ABSTRACT
The standards for educational and psychological testing serve as a crucial resource to navigate construct measurement. This chapter draws on these standards and reviews self-report instruments used to measure postsecondary students’ sense of belonging to provide a summary of considerations and guidance for researchers and practitioners. Various teams have developed original instruments to measure belonging based on their unique purpose. Despite being named a membership scale, the Psychological Sense of School Membership scale (PSSM) was unmistakably designed as a “measure of individual differences in belonging”. The use of specific belonging-related items from large data sets extends beyond descriptive reporting. The assumed simplicity of the development, administration, and analysis of self-report instruments persistently attract both researchers and practitioners.
