Jeremy Flaherty

A Multilevel Systemic Model of Community Attachment: Assessing the Relative Importance of the Community and Individual Levels1

To what extent does community context affect individuals’ social ties and levels of community attachment? The authors replicate Sampson’s multilevel version of Kasarda and Janowitz’s systemic model of community using data from a survey of nearly 10,000 people residing in 99 small Iowa communities. They improve on Sampson’s work by using multilevel statistical tools, better measurement of community attachment, and data from 99 actual communities. While the authors find general support for the systemic model, their results suggest that the community one lives in actually has little effect on one’s level of community attachment, calling into question many of the basic assumptions and findings of past community research.

Olympic Boomtown: The Social Impacts of a One-Time Mega-Event in Utah's Heber Valley

We extend the research on the individual and community-level impacts of rapid growth development (boomtowns) to include communities that have been affected by a short-term, yet large-scale “mega-event”—the Olympics. Testing the assumption of generic similarities of social impacts between these two types of communities, we examined longitudinal survey data from six survey years (between 1999 through 2003, and 2007), gathered in Utahs Heber Valley (the site of the February 2002 Soldier Hollow Salt Lake City, Utah Olympic cross-country skiing venue), to test for differences across established indicators of social disruption. We find that the Olympics had an important positive effect on residents’ community satisfaction during the year of the Olympics. While the literature on rapid growth communities provided a useful framework for the study of mega-event impacts on communities, our conclusions indicate a need to establish a more robust model for assessing how hosting an event can potently alter the relationship residents have with their community. Specifically, future research should focus on understanding the social-psychological effects of mega-event social disruption.

Cultural Antecedents to Community: An Evaluation of Community Experience in the United States, Thailand, and Vietnam: CULTURAL ANTECEDENTS TO COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE

To what extent does community experience differ between low–context and high–context societies? Prior literature theorizes that community experience consists of two separate, yet highly related concepts: community attachment, an individuals general rootedness to a place, and community satisfaction, how well an individuals community meets their societal needs. We test this conceptualization of community experience across communities in the United States and two Southeast Asian nations: Thailand and Vietnam. We argue that Southeast Asian nations constitute “high–context” societies with relatively high social integration and solidarity while the United States is more individualized and less socially integrated and thus constitutes a “low–context” society. Our results provide empirical evidence that individuals’ experience of community varies between low– and high–context societies. These results demonstrate that cultural context continues to matter in regards to the lived experience of community and researchers need to remain vigilant in accounting for such differences as they seek to examine the concept of community more broadly.

From mass consumer society to a society of consumers: Consumption and the experience of community in late modernity

Abstract Many scholars argue that consumption of goods and services has eclipsed the local community as the locus of contact between the individual and society. Residents of two Mississippi Delta communities, in 1996 and again in 2007, were asked how often they shopped for consumable items outside of their communities. Logistic regression demonstrates a significant interaction effect between year and outshopping such that outshopping was positively associated with community sentiment in 1996 but not in 2007. These results may reflect larger shifts in society, as the function which community traditionally served – an access point to society – may have been replaced by hyper-individualized consumption. Such a transformation in consumption habits is adequately explained by the effects which globalization has had on rural residents’ consumption habits. Arguably, peoples’ contact point with society has shifted from its once solid-modern and genuine community footings to its present “liquid” and unstable simulacra of community.