In a recent (non-profit) client project, we’ve been looking for a way to measure the impact of community upon members.
Some aspects, like a sense of community or single-dimensional questions, don’t measure the full benefits of the community.
So we’ve been testing different methods and one has proven interesting; the Quality of Life scale.
The WHO version has different surveys. We’ve taken the 100-question version and reduced it down to a more manageable set of 15 questions. Right now we’re testing members when they join, members who have been members for more than a year, and a comparable set of members who haven’t joined.
I suspect this will be a better method of capturing the wide range of benefits of community participation across many areas.