Sense of community through physical activity and recreation

There is an increasing demand for sport and leisure programmes to demonstrate their contribution to broader social outcomes. However, demonstrating social impact is a challenging endeavour in both theory and practice. There is a need for measures that sufficiently capture the complexity of participant experience whilst being practicable for those engaged in the delivery and management of sport and leisure activities. Through the adaptation of a Sense of Community (SoC) scale, this research note presents one such measure in the context of a community Walking for Health group. With further validation, the measure presented here may provide a reliable social impact assessment instrument to capture participants’ relationship to, and strength of feelings about, being part of a community. This exploration will be of interest to those seeking to understand and rigourise the social value of sport and physical activity provision.