The Effect of the Appreciative Inquiry Method on Improving a Sense of Community Among 2021 IFoP Members
Abstract
A sense of community is very important for the management of an organization. It can help maintain the continuity of the organization and the proactive attitude of its members. Based on the results of a pretest conducted on 21 IFoP administrators for the 2021 period, it was found that four administrators had a very low sense of community and three administrators had a low sense of community. These seven administrators received an intervention in the form of an appreciative inquiry method to increase their sense of community. The research design used in this method was a quasi experiment with one-group pretest-posttest design. The pretest and posttest used a modified measuring instrument called Sense of Community Index-2 from McMillan & Chavis. Meanwhile, the appreciative inquiry method used the stages proposed by Cooperrider, Whitney and Stavros. The results showed that there was a difference in the level of sense of community after the intervention compared to before. The Wilcoxon test that was carried out on the pretest and posttest scores of the research subjects showed a significant result with a p-value of 0.018 (< 0.05). Based on these results, it can be concluded that the appreciative inquiry method can be used to increase the sense of community.
Keywords: appreciative inquiry, sense of community, IFoP
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