Social Climate

Introduction

After introducing the conceptual and historical underpinnings of social climate, we describe three key sets of dimensions that characterize it, set out the development and psychometric procedures involved in constructing scales to assess social climate, and cover such issues as scale construction criteria, participants' and observers' perspectives, and environmental preferences. We then review applications, including comparing and contrasting environments and identifying determinants and assessing the impacts of social climate. Next, we consider broader issues involving cross-cultural generalizability, person-environment matching models, and viewing social environments in an ecological perspective. We close by noting that social climate assessment promotes a transactional perspective on the interplay between person and environment.

The social climate is the ‘personality’ of a setting or environment, such as a family, a workplace, a classroom, or a residential neighbourhood. Each environment has a unique ‘personality’ that gives it unity and coherence. Like people, some social environments are friendlier and more supportive than others. Just as some people are self-directed and task oriented, some environments encourage self-direction and task orientation. Like people, environments differ in how restrictive and controlling they are. Social climate measures differentiation among environments as personality inventories differentiate among individuals.

The concept of social climate and environmental demands or expectations has a long history. Henry Murray (1938) noted that individuals have specific [Page 889]needs; the relative strength of these needs characterized personality. Murray's model focused on how the interplay between an individuaL's needs and an environment's demands influences the individuaL's behaviour and well-being. He selected the terms alpha and beta ‘press’ to describe the objective and perceived forces, respectively, that environments place on individuals. Murray's concept of needs led to the development of new procedures to assess personality; more recently there has been a parallel development of measures to assess social climate.

George Stern (1970) noted that descriptions of environmental demands are based on inferred continuity and consistency in otherwise discrete events. In this vein, people form global ideas about an environment from their perceptions of specific aspects of it. When employees help each other with work, take breaks together, and go out of their way to welcome a new employee, the social climate at work is friendly. When neighbours recognize and greet one another, watch one another's homes when they are away, and cooperate to improve the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood social climate is cohesive. Such everyday, real events contribute to people's judgements and impressions of the social climate.

Fundamental advances have been made in the assessment of social climate in the last 30 years. Integrated assessment procedures are available to identify the most important aspects of family, work, educational, and other social settings. Such methods can be used to describe social climates, examine how social climates influence individuals' well-being and performance, understand why some social settings are more cohesive, task oriented, and structured than others, and enable counsellors to help individuals select and create more satisfying and effective life contexts.

Underlying Dimensions of Social Climate

A wide variety of settings can be described in terms of three underlying sets of social climate dimensions: relationship dimensions, personal growth or goal orientation dimensions, and system maintenance and change dimensions (Moos, 1994). Table 1 depicts some of the specific dimensions that have been identified in family, work, educational, residential care and treatment facilities, and neighbourhood environments. Relationship dimensions assess the quality [Page 890]of personal relationships in a setting. They tap how involved people are, how socially cohesive they are, and how much they help and support one another.

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