James Laurence

Composition, Concentration and Deprivation: Exploring their Association with Social Cohesion among Different Ethnic Groups in the UK

Although studies in the US have shown an association between the ethnic residential composition of an area and reports of decreased social cohesion among its residents, this association is not clear in the UK, and particularly for ethnic minority groups. The current study analyses a merged dataset from the 2005 and 2007 Citizenship Survey to assess the evidence for an association between social cohesion and ethnic residential concentration, composition and area deprivation across different ethnic groups in the UK. Results of the multilevel regression models show that, after adjusting for area deprivation, increased levels of social cohesion are found in areas of greater ethnic residential heterogeneity. Although different patterns emerge across ethnic groups and the measure of social cohesion used, findings consistently show that it is area deprivation, and not ethnic residential heterogeneity, which erodes social cohesion in the UK.

Doing Good When Times Are Bad: Volunteering Behaviour in Economic Hard Times

This paper examines how the 2008-9 recession has affected volunteering behaviours in the UK. Using a large survey dataset, we assess the recession effects on both formal volunteering and informal helping behaviours. Whilst both formal volunteering and informal helping have been in decline in the UK since 2008, the size of the decline is significantly larger for informal helping than for formal volunteering. The decline is more salient in regions that experienced a higher level of unemployment during the recession and also in socially and economically disadvantaged communities. However, we find that a growing number of people who personally experienced financial insecurity and hardship do not explain the decline. We argue that the decline has more to do with community-level factors such as civic organizational infrastructure and cultural norms of trust and engagement than personal experiences of economic hardship.

Wider-community Segregation and the Effect of Neighbourhood Ethnic Diversity on Social Capital: An Investigation into Intra-Neighbourhood Trust in Great Britain and London

Extensive research has demonstrated that neighbourhood ethnic diversity is negatively associated with intra-neighbourhood social capital. This study explores the role of segregation and integration in this relationship. To do so it applies three-level hierarchical linear models to two sets of data from across Great Britain and within London, and examines how segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested impacts trust amongst neighbours. This study replicates the increasingly ubiquitous finding that neighbourhood diversity is negatively associated with neighbour-trust. However, we demonstrate that this relationship is highly dependent on the level of segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested. Increasing neighbourhood diversity only negatively impacts neighbour-trust when nested in more segregated wider-communities. Individuals living in diverse neighbourhoods nested within integrated wider-communities experience no trust-penalty. These findings show that segregation plays a critical role in the neighbourhood diversity/trust relationship, and that its absence from the literature biases our understanding of how ethnic diversity affects social cohesion.

Community Disadvantage and Race-Specific Rates of Violent Crime: An Investigation into the “Racial Invariance” Hypothesis in the United Kingdom

Research into how structural disadvantage affects violent crime among racial groups has produced mixed results. In the United States, however, black and white community-level disadvantage distributions only partially overlap, precluding critical tests of the “racial invariance” hypothesis. We examine the relationship between race, violent crime, and disadvantage in the United Kingdom, where disadvantage distributions for race-groups have greater comparability. Using London borough-level data, we observe racial-invariance at comparably low/high disadvantage. However, at extreme disadvantage the effect increases significantly for black communities but not white or South Asian. This conflicts with studies demonstrating either racial invariance or weaker effects among blacks.

Ethnic Diversity, Inter-group Attitudes and Countervailing Pathways of Positive and Negative Inter-group Contact: An Analysis Across Workplaces and Neighbourhoods

This study advances the current literature investigating the relationship between contextual out-group exposure, inter-group attitudes and the role of inter-group contact. Firstly, it introduces the concept of contact-valence into this relationship; that is, whether contact is experienced positively or negatively. Secondly, it presents a comparative analysis of how processes of out-group exposure and frequency of (valenced) contact affect prejudice across both neighbourhoods and workplaces. Applying path analysis modelling to a nationally-representative sample of white British individuals in England, we demonstrate, across both contexts, that increasing out-group exposure is associated with higher rates of both positively- and negatively-valenced contact. This results in exposure exhibiting both positive and negative indirect associations with prejudice via more frequent inter-group mixing. These countervailing contact-pathways help explain how out-group exposure is associated with inter-group attitudes. In neighbourhoods, increasing numbers of individuals experiencing positive-contact suppress an otherwise negative effect of neighbourhood diversity (driven partly by increasing numbers of individuals reporting negative contact). Across workplaces the effect differs such that increasing numbers of individuals experiencing negative-contact suppress an otherwise positive effect of workplace diversity (driven largely by increasing numbers of individuals experiencing positive contact).

Countervailing Contact: Community Ethnic Diversity, Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Mediating Pathways of Positive and Negative Inter-Ethnic Contact in European societies

Inter-ethnic contact has long been held as a key means of ameliorating possible inter-group tensions and facilitating the integration of increasing immigrant populations into society. However, our understanding of the role of contact in this relationship may be limited due to the omission of contact-valence; that is, whether contact is experienced positively or negatively. This paper integrates the concept of contact-valence into the question of how increasing community diversity affects attitudes towards immigrants via inter-group contact, across Europe. We posit the existence of dual, mediating pathways of both positive and negative inter-group contact. Applying generalized structural equation models to data from the 2014 European Social Survey, we find that living in more diverse communities increases the frequency of positive inter-group contact but also negative inter-group contact. While the former is positively associated with inter-group attitudes the latter is negatively associated. Testing demonstrates that diversity exerts countervailing positive and negative indirect-effects on attitudes towards immigrants via processes of inter-group contact. Furthermore, while the net-effect of diversity on attitudes via contact is positive, attitudes amongst those experiencing more frequent negative contact become progressively worse. Increasing diversity therefore leads to a polarisation in attitudes towards immigration as a result of, and not due to a lack of, inter-group contact.

The efficacy of neighbourhood attitudes as measures of social capital: returning to norms and values and the centrality of networks

1 The efficacy of neighbourhood attitudes as measures of social capital: returning to norms and values and the centrality of networks James Laurence REFERENCE: Laurence, J. (2015). The efficacy of neighbourhood attitudes as measures of social capital: returning to norms and values and the centrality of networks. In Y. Li (Ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Social Capital (pp. 145-164). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.