The commitment to the city: pilot assessment and preliminary psychometric indicators of questionnaire

Abstract

In the current study we raise the problem of defining and studying the relationship of an individual to one’s place of residence through the assessment of commitment to the city. Commitment is revealed from the standpoint of organizational psychology: both general and specific features of the city as a particular type of organization are highlighted, and the phenomenology is described and refined, allowing the correlation of the concepts of urban commitment, identification, and identity. Commitment to the city is understood as a special form of a person's relationship to the place of residence and surroundings, including urban identity, which acts as a predictor of the degree of one’s involvement in public life, actual and potential migratory behavior. The methodological prerequisites for developing a structure of commitment to the city are presented with the aim of creating a questionnaire for its assessment. The procedure and results of an exploratory study (N=202) on the validation of the questionnaire are provided: the structure and content of the scales were developed (the factor structure includes three scales: loyalty, involvement, identification), internal consistency, retest reliability and convergent validity were also examined. The latter was tested by means of the assessment of identity with the city by S.A. Litvina and O.I. Muravyova, and the scale of migratory attitudes of personality by S.A. Kuznetsova, I.Yu. Kuznetsova, and A.V. Feshchenko. As a result, significant moderate and strong positive correlations were obtained between the scales of the city commitment questionnaire and the scales of identity, and moderate negative correlations with the scales of migration attitudes. The prospects and limitations of the developed questionnaire are indicated, allowing for, after additional research, the projection of the assessment of an individual's commitment to a particular city to other places of residence.