The relevance of place and family stage for styles of community involvement

Abstract

Community involvement may be a nuanced aspect of individuals' lives, and the place of residence could play a role. In this paper, we created a measure of four different styles of community involvement using cluster analysis, then investigated how education, work involvement, family stage (marriage and parenthood and age of the youngest child), gender, and the local residential community influence the style of involvement for a randomly sampled survey of residents in four upstate New York communities (N = 1006). The locally networked were involved through informal exchanges, and their friends were mostly family and neighbors; the institutionally embedded volunteered and made friends through organizations and work; moderates invested in formal institutions and local networks, and the loosely connected were minimally involved in local community life. Family stage, educational level, work involvement, and local community of residence helped predict styles of community involvement.

La participation aux communautés pourrait constituer un aspect nuancé de la vie des individus, et le lieu de résidence pourrait y jouer un rôle. Dans cet article nous avons mesuré, dans un premier temps, quatre styles différents de participation à la vie de la communauté en faisant une analyse cluster. Dans un deuxième temps, nous avons examiné comment l'éducation, l'implication dans le travail, la situation familiale (mariage, enfants et âge de l'enfant le plus jeune), le sexe et la communauté locale influencent la façon de faire partie d'une communauté. Cette étude était basée sur un sondage auprès d'un échantillon aléatoire de résidents de quatre communautés dans le nord de l'Etat de New York (N = 1006). Les personnes en réseau local ont participé via des échanges informels et leurs amis étaient pour la plupart de la famille et des voisins. Ceux qui participaient au niveau institutionnel étaient volontaires et se sont fait des amis à des organismes et au travail. Les modérés participaient dans les institutions formelles ainsi que les réseaux de contacts locaux, ceux sans liens étroits avec la communauté participaient d'une façon minime à la vie commune. La situation familiale, le niveau d'éducation, l'implication dans le travail et la communauté locale ont permis de prédire la manière dont les individus participent à la vie de la communauté.

Keywords:

• participation
• volunteering
• gender
• informal networks
• residence
• civil society

Mots-clés:

• résidence
• espaces de la société civile
• participent
• échanges informels
• le sexe
• des réseaux de la société civile

Notes on contributors

Heather Hofmeister is a professor of sociology at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany, and currently serves as the chair of the department. Her Ph.D. in 2002 is from Cornell University, USA. Her German postdoc has led her to two consecutive professorships in Germany, the first of which was at the RWTH Aachen and included serving as vice president of human resources. Her current professorship focuses on the sociology of work. She specializes in the links between work and family, gender inequalities, gender in leadership, and community.

Penny Edgell is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Department of Sociology, and currently, the director of graduate studies. Her Ph.D. is from 1995 at the University of Chicago, and she was an assistant professor at Cornell University before her relocation to Minnesota. She specializes in how religion shapes moral culture and has interests also in gender and family, symbolic boundaries, and inequality.

Notes

1. This design of four communities, two urban and two rural, has been used by other community researchers, including Brown-Saracino (2004).

2. Gower's General Resemblance Coefficient is calculated by (1) dividing the matrix of attributes into groups by the level of measurement; (2) calculating resemblance coefficients for each submatrix; (3) weighted summation of the resemblance coefficients calculated for each submatrix. The Jaccard coefficient is used as the resemblance coefficient for the binary submatrix. The city block metric is used for the continuous variables, and the simple matching coefficient is used for multistate qualitative variables.

3. Because SAS uses measures of dissimilarity to calculate distances, 1-Gower is used.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Lilly Endowment [grant number 1996 1880-000, Penny Edgell, Principal Investigator] and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [grant number 96-6-9, 99-6-23, Phyllis Moen, Principal Investigator].