Residential stability and social contact: Testing for saved versus liberated communities
✍ Scribed by Leslie W. Kennedy
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1984
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 596 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0090-4392
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Residential mobility was examined using a path-model to determine the importance of social contact with friends and neighbors as a predictor of the desire to move. No effects were found. The major factors leading to moving aspirations related to both residential and neighborhood satisfaction. Wellman (1979) has argued that research on the urban community has focused too much attention on local solidarity while ignoring the search for functioning primary ties, wherever located and however solidary. He believes that the proper concern of social researchers is the analysis of social structure and social linkages, with questions related to processes of spatial distribution and local sentiment holding important but secondary positions (Wellman, 1979(Wellman, , p. 1202)). The urban community, once believed to be "lost" (Hunter, 1975;Wirth, 1938) has simply had local ties replaced by metropolitanwide networks providing social and moral support to the individual in a "liberated" community (Wellman, 1979, p. 1203). The local community becomes decreasingly a place of social support and contact (Wellman, 1979).
Contradicting this view that local ties in urban communities are weak are the findings of researchers with a "saved" community perspective (Wellman, 1979). Gans (1970) reports that people select certain neighborhoods particularly because of the neighbors they expect to find there. When people move to areas where their neighbors are the same as them in terms of income or education, social ties develop (Michelson, 1975). Social contact also emerges under certain environmental conditions. People living in single family dwellings, for instance, are more likely to have local contacts than are those living in high-rises (Kennedy, 1978). Where social ties are strong, we would expect that people have an increased commitment to an area. While Wellman may be correct in saying that mobility weakens ties, the view of the "saved" community argues that where certain social and/or physical factors exist in a neighborhood, social contact will be high. Under these conditions, mobility should therefore be reduced. With lower mobility (or even propensity to move) the local community should become the primary place for social support and interaction. Cross-metropolitan ties would then become less important.
What is at issue in comparing these two perspectives on the community (the saved versus the liberated) is the role that strong local ties play in influencing people's decisions about moving. If we find that local ties do reduce the propensity to move, the case for the liberated community is somewhat weakened. If, on the other hand, we find that local ties have no effect on the propensity to move, the case for the liberated community is much stronger.
In the following discussion we will review the literature on residential mobility and discuss the importance of this concept as a measure of adjustment and commitment to an urban area. We will then propose a model we can use to test the importance of social ties in predicting the likelihood that people would consider a move from a current dwelling.