Need to Belong Scale

What it is

Baumeister and Leary argued in 1995 that the need to belong is a fundamental motivation. A claim about a motive invites a question about people: do they differ in how much of it they have? The Need to Belong Scale is a questionnaire built to measure that difference.

The 2013 paper, Construct validity of the Need to Belong Scale: Mapping the nomological network, reports nine studies in the Journal of Personality Assessment. Construct validity asks whether a scale measures what it claims to measure, and a nomological network is the set of other measures it should and should not relate to. The authors found that scores overlapped with extraversion and affiliation motivation but stayed distinct from them, so the scale does not simply measure sociability. Scores correlated with identities defined by social attributes, and were associated with emotional reactions to rejection and with values centred on interpersonal relationships.

In effect

The scale turns a general claim into something that can vary from person to person. The finding that it is distinct from extraversion matters for the central question of the article Why Do We Need to Belong?, because wanting acceptance is not the same as being outgoing. A person can want belonging a great deal and seek few social occasions, and another can seek many occasions with a modest wish for acceptance.

The 2010 review by Judith Gere and Geoff MacDonald made individual differences one of the areas in which future work on the need to belong should concentrate. The scale is one of the tools that make such work possible.

What it does not say

A score on the scale describes how much a person reports wanting acceptance and belonging. It does not describe how much belonging the person has, and it is not a measure of wellbeing or of any health outcome.

The 2013 paper is a validity study, so its results describe how the scale relates to other measures. This page does not use the scale to say anything about individuals.

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