Won’t You Be My Neighbor? The Motivating Factors Behind Neighborhood Participation

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a visible push in Chicago for neighborhood-focused initiatives as a means of combatting various social issues, including poverty, crime, and unemployment. Epitomized by the 2009 creation of the White House Office of Urban Affairs and its Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, these types of policies hold a neighborhood’s health as vitally important to the wellbeing of its residents. Actual neighborhood change, however, is often the result of residents taking it upon themselves to act in the best interest of their communities. Considering the wide variety of neighborhood types and residential experiences, what are the key environmental factors that lead to individuals engaging in neighborhood activism?

Researcher Megan E. Gilster explores this question in “Putting Activism in its Place: The Neighborhood Context of Participation in Neighborhood-Focused Activism.” Published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, the new study on neighborhood activism in Chicago dissects commonly held theories on the motivations behind neighborhood participation. Similar studies on neighborhood activism tend to explore only disadvantaged neighborhoods; Gilster’s research addresses this by utilizing a new approach that measures socioeconomic status along two dimensions – neighborhood affluence and neighborhood disadvantage – in order to understand the relationship between the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood and its level of activism.

Additionally, Gilster takes into consideration both the characteristics of individuals in a community as well as the characteristics of the neighborhood as a whole in order to conduct a more holistic analysis. Neighborhood activism, she notes, describes any activity that helps to foster changes in a neighborhood, from participation in collective-action to local volunteering. Gilster’s study explores this type of activism on an individual level, rather than through organizations.

Using data from the Chicago Community Adult Health Study, the Uniform Crime Reports, and the 2000 US Census, Gilster tests three common hypotheses on neighborhood types that cultivate greater levels of activism. According to the first hypothesis, higher resource levels in a neighborhood lead to greater levels of participation. The second hypothesis suggests that problems that arise in disadvantaged neighborhoods induce increased participation. And in the third hypothesis, tension between advantaged and disadvantaged populations within a single neighborhood is a key motivator for residents to participate in some form of activism.

Gilster performs several analyses utilizing multiple variables from the data, including levels of activism in different neighborhoods, characteristics of individual respondents to survey questions, neighborhood socioeconomic statuses, and measures of neighborhood problems. The study tests these factors along two dimensions, first by controlling for neighborhood variation while measuring individuals’ likelihood to participate, and then by controlling for individual characteristics while testing the effect of neighborhood socioeconomic context on residents’ participation. Taken together, the data show support for the first and second hypotheses, but not for the third.

In particular, the analyses reveal that higher levels of education motivate individuals to participate in neighborhood-focused activism. It also finds that activism is more prevalent in highly advantaged and highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. Crucially, the research indicates that these findings remain true when considered collectively: individuals’ socioeconomic statuses indicate similar levels of participation regardless of the statuses of their neighborhoods, while high- and low-advantaged neighborhoods see high levels of participation regardless of the socioeconomic statuses of their individual residents.

Gilster’s research suggests a number of policy implications for neighborhood interventions. Due to the complex interplay between individual and neighborhood characteristics in determining levels of activism that can lead to actual change, the study proposes that policies should be implemented that support existing neighborhood activism. These policies should focus on assisting not only individuals, but also on helping places. By implementing place-based policies that balance neighborhood improvement with individual assistance, this study argues, policymakers may have a real chance at enacting tangible change in a variety of neighborhoods.

Article Source: Megan E. Gilster, “Putting Activism in its Place: The Neighborhood Context of Participation in Neighborhood-Focused Activism,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, No. 1 (January 2014): 33-50.

Feature photo: cc/(@BAM_S)