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The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community

  • Original Article
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American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community. Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principles of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.

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Notes

  1. Values greater than 50 % are conceptually possible and describe what is known as dissortative mixing, where a person is surrounded primarily by dissimilar others. In a neighborhood context, this might occur for one or two households (e.g. a single minority household in a majority neighborhood). However, it can occur neighborhood-wide only if minority and majority households are arranged in a very precise “stripe” pattern, which guarantees that any given household has a maximum of only two similar neighbors (i.e. one in one direction, and another in the opposite direction). Such an arrangement is does not seem realistic, so we have excluded it from our simulations. This exclusion does not affect our results, which we find remain the same even if we had also simulated such unrealistic hyper-integrated neighborhoods.

  2. The only widespread example of heterophily, the opposite of homophily wherein relationships are more likely between dissimilar people, is along gender lines in the formation of romantic and sexual relationships among heterosexual individuals: heterosexual men form relationships primarily with women, and not with other men, and vice versa.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the staff at the High Performance Computing Center at Michigan State University for their technical assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 509 E. Circle Drive, Room 316, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Zachary P. Neal

  2. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, Room 262, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Jennifer Watling Neal

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  1. Zachary P. Neal
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Correspondence to Zachary P. Neal.

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Neal, Z.P., Neal, J.W. The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community. Am J Community Psychol 53, 1–12 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-013-9608-0

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