I make an empirical study in which I intent to highlight a possible relationship between the need for individuals to be integrated into a community, and their willingness to work for the benefit of that community.
In this purpose I identified 12 universally valid needs and I asked the participants in the study to appreciate the probability that community favorably respond to each need (on a Likert-type scale, from 1 to 5).
The next question invites participants in the study to appreciate how would they act if today would be called upon to support their community. For this I offer five possible answers, of which the subjects could choose only one alternative (beginning from “I would engage without hesitation”, to “Community can handle it just as well without me”.
In this moment I'm not fully clarified, what statistical tool is recommended to identify a possible relationship (or not) between the two variables (the need of the subjects to integrate into the community and their willingness to participate in activities for community benefit)?
I can see that some answers would be idealized. Many will answer favorably in hopes that they would respond favorably in reporting willingness. It might be beneficial to ask what barriers prevent community involvement and percentages of time desired to give to community and percentage actually given. Also asking the person's five areas of community advocacy listed in priority. Assessment of connectedness and attachment is important because people can do acts of service with no real attachment to the community. It would be good to determine how much an individual identifies with the community.
Since each of your need variable responses is on a 5-point scale and your single community support variable is also on a 5-point scale (unclear if quantitative or qualitative), I would recommend running a Chi Square analysis on each of your 12 need variables against your community variable in a contingency table. Any basic statistical program (e.g., SAS, SPSS, etc.) can perform the analyses.
It is important to determine what are the needs of the community to determine a persons willingness to be involved. A person who might otherwisw not get involved might may want to if the need is considered essential or life threatening
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