Collective efficacy as a measure of community

As human-computer interaction increasingly focuses on mediated interactions among groups of individuals, there is a need to develop techniques for measurement and analysis of groups that have been scoped at the level of the group. Bandura's construct of perceived self-efficacy has been used to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. The construct of collective efficacy extends self-efficacy to organizations and groups, referring to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. We describe the development and refinement of a collective efficacy scale, the factor analysis of the construct, and its external validation in path models of community-oriented attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.