Psychological sense of community and newspaper readership

An hypothesized association of psychological sense of community and newspaper readership was tested using telephone interviews with 1,007 randomly selected respondents in two stales. The survey contained a 5-items measure of psychological sense of community and two indices of newspaper readership, amount of interest in local, state, and national news (3 items) and breadth of reading (14 items in one sample and 23 items in another). Regression analyses indicated significant relationships between scores on the Psychological Sense of Community scale and both readership indices after controlling for 5 demographic variables. Respondents with high scores on the Psychological Sense of Community scale reported a high interest in news about local, state, and national topics. Also, they claimed to read frequently many sections of their local newspaper.