Research by John Schweitzer and the Sense of Community (SOC) Project in Lansing demonstrates the importance of sense of community in contributing to the overall quality of life in a community. Residents living in areas where they share a sense of community with their neighbors are more likely to feel safe and secure and have a lower fear of crime. They tend to have higher rates of civic engagement as indicated by voter registration and participation. They are more likely to recycle and to engage in prosocial behaviors like helping others, volunteering, and donating blood. However, sense of community is not evenly distributed within a given neighborhood. There is a great variation in the sense of community from one block to another in the same neighborhood. Therefore, it is important to consider the smallest geographic area possible when assessing the overall health of a community.
The SOC Project uses a unit of measurement and analysis that has not
been used extensively in prior research. A geographically based unit
that lends itself to fine-scaled data collection is the 100-block. The
100-block is defined as the residences on a given street having addresses
that fall within a range of one hundred, for example, all the residences
having an address between 100 and 199 Maple Avenue. The "100-block"
is different from the Census definition of a block. Figure 1 compares the
100-block to the Census Block. It was felt that the 100-block unit
adequately represents how residents interact with each other on a particular
street.
There is empirical evidence for the utility and saliency of such a unit of data aggregation. John Schweitzer (1995, 1996, and 1997), through the SOC Project, has studied urban face blocks, which typically consist of the same residences as the 100-block unit. This research has shown that there is great variability in the sense of community that exists on urban face blocks, and that this construct is related to such pro-civil activities voting, recycling, and giving blood. Blocks with high sense of community experience lower levels of fear of crime. These empirical research findings indicate that the 100-block unit is appropriate for the study of social capital.
This unit has been chosen for several reasons. First, people derive
meaning from their immediate geographic region. Second, while boundaries
of neighborhoods and communities are subjective and often difficult to
define or find agreement with, a face block is more likely to have objective
boundaries. Third, preliminary work using the measure of sense of community,
has indicated that the social fabric is typically not homogenous throughout
any given neighborhood. There is consistent variation from place to place
within a neighborhood. This finding necessitated using a geographic unit
(face block) smaller than the neighborhood to measure the community's social
fabric.
