Abstract
Community-building initiatives strive to involve residents as the drivers of the change process, involving them in an array of activities including collective action efforts. Recent evaluations of many of these initiatives, however, suggest that developing the levels of resident involvement needed in such efforts is challenging. This study examines the neighborhood conditions that are related to whether and how much residents become involved in individual activism and collective action efforts. A random-digit-dial phone survey of 460 residents in 7 distressed neighborhoods suggested that while demographic variables were relatively unimportant, resident perceptions of neighborhood readiness (i.e., hope for the future and collective efficacy) and capacity for change (i.e., social ties and neighborhood leadership), and the level of neighborhood problems were strongly related to whether and how much residents were involved in individual and collective action efforts. Moreover, different elements of these neighborhood conditions were more or less important depending on the type and level of resident involvement. For example, while perceptions of neighborhood problems was the strongest predictor of whether an individual became involved at all, perceived strength of neighborhood leadership was the strongest predictor of an individual’s level of activity. The implications of these findings for practitioners and scientists are discussed.
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Notes
Comprehensive community change initiatives have taken on a variety of forms and names, including comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) and community-based participatory research (CBPR). We refer to them as CBIs in this paper given the emphasis of the initiative targeted in this paper and the preferences of the foundation funding this initiative.
We collected key informant information in two ways. First, the first author participated in monthly meetings with W.K. Kellogg Foundation staff, local community organizers, and community development consultants who participated in this initiative. One hour each month was dedicated in these meetings to evaluation concerns, including identifying how to operationalize key constructs for measurement within this community. Second, focus groups involving 140 adult and 90 youth residents in the seven targeted neighborhoods were held prior to this data collection and implementation of the initiative to learn how readiness and capacity issues played themselves out in this community.
We chose to use logistic regression for this analysis due to the skewed distribution of the continuous dependent variable. We considered a variety of transformations (square root, inverse, and natural log) that are often used to fix such violations of assumptions, but none of them produced acceptable results. Thus, we concluded that logistic regression technique was simply better suited to analyzing the data. For that reason we dichotomized the outcome variable as described.
Other work with this data, not included in this paper, assesses geographic correlates of neighborhood readiness and capacity. “Anyone in your family” was included in the item stem to avoid underestimating the level of resident activism present among the set of households in the neighborhood.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the residents who participated in the phone survey featured in this manuscript and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for supporting this evaluation effort. We would also like to thank Hester Hughes, Tom Summerfelt, Cherise Brandell, and Teri Barker for all their help in carrying out this project. This project was supported by a grant received by the first author from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
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Foster-Fishman, P.G., Cantillon, D., Pierce, S.J. et al. Building an active citizenry: the role of neighborhood problems, readiness, and capacity for change. Am J Community Psychol 39, 91–106 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9097-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9097-0