Current Projects

 

"Friendliest" Blocks in Lansing

Database Project

Neighborhood Social Capital Study

The Impact of Neighborhood Sense of Community
On Children, Youth, and Families, 1997-1999

Frontsteps Experiment

"Friendliest" Blocks in Lansing

For the last five years the Sense of Community Project has been studying the sense of community that exists on residential blocks.  Findings of the study indicate a huge variation between blocks though out the city.  On some blocks people feel like a family, and on other blocks residents hardly know each other.  We find that people living on the "friendly blocks" feel safer, contribute more to the greater community, and have a better quality of life than other residents.

A nomination form has been created and distributed to all of the community/neighborhood organizations and block watch groups in the city.  The groups are encouraged to nominate "friendly blocks", even their own!  Some examples of "friendly blocks" are those that meet outside of their scheduled block meetings for anything from potlucks to gardening, have exchanged spare keys with a trusted neighbor, and those that have become like extended family.

The goals of this project is to identify all of the "friendliest blocks" in the city to find out how common they are and to learn how to help create "friendly blocks".

 If you would like to submit a nomination form for your "friendliest" block or one that you know, you may do so at:
Lansing's "Friendliest" Block Contest !

The major undertaking for the Sense of Community Project is to construct a comprehensive database that contains all available databases, measures, and indices that might reflect social capital.   There is a wide variety of data not previously merged and aggregated to a unit that has geographic and social relevance, such as the 100-block level.  As it is currently being developed, the 100-block database will contain crime, voting, education data, and the new measure of sense of community in addition to the original sense of community data.  Each source of data will be obtained at the measurement level it was collected at and then aggregated or disaggregated to the 100-block level to be included in the database.

For example, voting data, one measure of social capital, is available at the individual level, and it will be entered into the database at that level.  Another indicator of social capital, the existence of block watch groups, will be measured and entered into the database at the level of a group of blocks. The units of measurement will consist of geographic, social and non-geographic units.  The geographic units will consist of individual, household, building, face block, census block, assessor’s block group, block crime watch group, census block group, voting precinct, neighborhood, police precinct, zip code area, census tract, and wards data.  The social and other non-geographic units will consist of nonprofit organizations, community based organizations, service organizations, e.g. Lions, Kiwanis, etc., religious congregations, and racial/ethnic groups and organizations data.   In addition, existing and archival data will be collected from U.S. Census Data, public voting records, police crime records, Lansing School District records, the State Education Department, health providers and insurers, hospitals, City Assessor’s Office, and community and service organization membership lists.

In addition to the archival data from existing records, a sample of residents will be surveyed to measure the social capital emanating from their interactions with their immediate neighbors and their involvement with other community members, groups, and organizations.  This survey is known as the Neighborhood Social Capital Study.  Data from the survey will be integrated with the existing database allowing for an array of theoretical as well as applied studies of social capital.  The whole database will be geo-coded and linked with maps of Lansing streets, parks, schools, and many other relevant aspects of the built and natural environment in the city.  This will allow geographic analysis and display of the distribution of social capital throughout the city and will enable the researchers to understand in substantial detail the interactions of human beings with their physical and social environments at a variety of spatial scales.

The database is being constructed to be dynamic so that it can be continually updated with data on new variables that may become available and more recent data on old variables such as crime and voting that are already part of the database.  The database will be ready to be aggregated to geographic units larger than the 100-block, such as census-block groups or neighborhoods.  In the future the database will be linked to a GIS system to generate maps that display social capital data in relation to the other data in the database.  These maps would be capable of showing measures at geographic units larger than the 100-block.

The database will be available for use by all persons who have an interest in the City of Lansing.  The database should provide useful both to academic researchers who want to test theories and examine relationships among variables, and to neighborhood and community activists who need to know more about the strengths and weaknesses of their neighborhoods.  The database developed by this project will allow for many studies of social capital including such investigations as the relationship of social capital to the built environment and the natural environment, and the relationship of social capital to educational achievement.

Neighborhood Social Capital Study

The Neighborhood Social Capital Scale will be used to measure sense of community at the 100-block level.  The instrument is designed to measure the following two dimensions:  (1) the level of trust and (2) the amount of communication that exist among community residents who live in close proximity to each other.  A review of the literature and initial empirical data that has been collected on 46 face blocks in Lansing indicate that trust and communication may be two fundamental dimensions of social capital in urban neighborhoods.  In order to measure these dimensions, residents in the targeted neighborhood respond to a set of items in the Neighborhood Social Capital Scale that indicate the degree of trust and communication that exists between themselves and their five closest neighbors.  Respondents don’t identify themselves, but only indicate the 100-block that includes their residential address.

The purpose of this project is to measure, describe, and map the amount and distribution of social capital in the residential neighborhoods of the city of Lansing, Michigan.  A new geographically based unit of measurement is proposed for the database that allows for precise examination of urban neighborhoods without violating the privacy of individual residents.  This unit allows for the accumulation of other valuable data in addition to the social capital data.  The new unit proposed for aggregating data is referred to as the “100-block.”  Data from individual residences will be aggregated up to the 100-block level.  This technique allows for the addition of any data that is available by address without violating the confidentiality of individual residents.

Click here to learn more about the 100-block level of measurement and analysis.

The primary measure of social capital proposed for this study is a self-report instrument assessing the level of trust and communication existing among neighbors.  A new measure of social capital has been developed for this project.  The intent was to develop a more objective measure than the 25 Likert items used by Schweitzer to measure sense of community at the block level.  Based on the analysis of sense of community data from 46 blocks in Lansing and the in-depth ethnographic studies of four blocks, the new Neighborhood Social Capital Scale measures the degree of trust and connectedness existing at the immediate neighborhood level.

Click here to view the Neighborhood Social Capital Survey.

According to an analysis using records from the City Assessor's Office, Lansing contains 3,153 100-blocks having at least 5 residences.  These 100-blocks contain a total of 31,467 residences, or an average of almost exactly ten residences per 100-block. The project goal is to get at least two completed measures of social capital from each of the 3,153 residential 100-blocks in the city.  The short survey will be administered through the use of multiple source data collection.  Neighborhood organizations, block clubs, and crime watch groups will be enlisted to help in data collection.

The data from the new measure of social capital will be combined with the Database Project which will contain existing and archival data.   This comprehensive database is currently being developed at the 100-block level.  The database currently contains assessment data, crime data, voting data, and the original sense of community data.    The integration of the social capital data with the existing data will allow for an array of theoretical as well as applied studies of social capital.  Adding the new measure of social capital to a comprehensive database aggregated at the 100-block level would provide new insights into the relationship between social capital and other relevant data.

The Impact of Neighborhood Sense of Community
   on Children, Youth, and Families

The family/household unit functions within a local community consisting of a group of family/household units sharing the same geographic space. Dunham (1986) has pointed out that most people derive meaning from the immediate geographic region in which the live. Due to this reason, local communities have the ability to act and exert influence both internally and externally. Internally, the local community can influence both adults and children living within its borders. Adults are influenced through peer pressure or the idea of "keeping up with the Jones's." Children in a healthy local community are influenced in a positive way by the adults in the neighborhood; the idea that "it takes a whole village to raise a child."

Externally, the local community can act to exert pressure through a local neighborhood organization or other community group. Local communities vary in their ability to act and to exert pressure, both internally and externally, but in both cases, it is hypothesized that the sense of community that exists among the residents is positively related to that community's ability to have an impact. That is, the empowerment of a community, its ability to act, and the influence that the community exerts is a function of its sense of community, among other factors. A major indicator of the health of a community is the collective sense of the residents that they are part of a community that shares a common self-interest.

In most urban communities, the weakening of the social fabric has exacerbated existing problems. A strong social fabric characterized by trust, honest communication, and mutual support allows a community of individuals to collectively address their problems through the development of a collective sense of community. Therefore, the objective of this research is to determine:

Children in Lansing schools will be the unit of analysis. The sample of children and youth, their families, and 3 or 4 neighbors will be surveyed to assess "family functionality." Some indicators of this measure will include school success, physical health of children, other measures of achievement, involvement in social and community activities, sports, "keeping out of trouble," etc. Participation in the survey will be voluntary. Data will be analyzed by using hierarchical linear modeling to isolate the effects of individual variables and block level variables on the behavior of children, youth and families. The project is proposed to be conducted in the urban neighborhoods in the City of Lansing, Michigan and will conclude in June of 1999.

Frontsteps Experiment

In the Fall of 1998, a sample of 22 blocks was selected from the original 44 blocks in the Sense of Community in Lansing Neighborhoods Project.  Use of the original blocks for this experiment was preferred because of the existing knowledge of those blocks and the previous sense of community measure taken on them approximately 3 years ago in 1996 which may be used as a pre-test.

The sample was select by the following method.  First, an average of the six sense of community variables was taken to arrive at an overall sense of community score for each of the 44 blocks.  The blocks were then arranged from highest sense of community score to lowest sense of community score.  The highest and lowest scoring blocks were dropped.  The remaining 42 blocks were arranged into pairs based on similar sense of community scores.  There were 21 pairs of blocks.  One block out of each pair was put in the treatment group while the other was put in the control group.  The selection for treatment was based on which street’s name came first in alphabetical order.  If the first letter was the same the basis for selection became which second letter came first in alphabetical order.  In total 21 blocks were put in the treatment group and 21 into the control group.

Treatment groups will receive quarterly copies of the newsletter Front Steps for one year.  Other interventions will be completed on the treatment groups as possible, including but not limited to block parties or other social activities.  After one year of treatment, the treated blocks will be tested again using the sense of community measure created by the SOC project, as well as the Neighborhood Social Capital measure.

The Front Steps Newsletter is published quarterly by The Evergreen State Society with financial support from SAFECO. Online versions of past newsletters are available from The Evergreen State Society's web page.  Click on the edition you wish to view to go to The Evergreen State Society's page displaying that newsletter.

Current Projects