Development and Validation of the Sense of Online Community Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focused on the development and validation of the Sense of Online Community Scale (SOCS), which includes 28 Likert-type scale items across six subscales: (a) program community, (b) program academic activities, (c) program social activities, (d) institutional academic activities, (e) institutional social activities, and (f) affiliation. The validation process included an implementation with 293 learners enrolled in online programs at a higher education institution in the eastern United States. The model was evaluated with and without outliers, and results show that the model aligned well with the SOCS. The means of all items except one exceeded 3.5 on a 5.0 scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Time in an online program was not a statistically significant predictor of the validation model, though most of our participants were in the first or second year of their degree programs. Findings demonstrate that the SOCS is a reliable and valid instrument that other researchers may use to investigate community in online environments on both the program and the institutional level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".