Toward a definitive alienation scale.

Alienation is one of the most widely used constructs in sociology. Unfortunately, it is not clear that it is always the same construct as a wide diversity of scales is used to measure it. In the present work an attempt has been made to gather together all items of published scales said to measure alienation and see what they had in common: 168 items were collected and administered to a diverse community sample and were found to form a highly reliable scale which could be reduced to only 20 central items with little loss of reliability.