Despite longstanding ideas in sociology and related disciplines that hold rural life as being more communal and harmonious, little is known about the ways that social cohesion is defined or distributed in rural versus urban places. Stemming largely from scholarship on urban neighborhood inequality and concentrated disadvantage, as well as subsequent offshoots of collective efficacy theory, studies of place-based cohesion have been largely urban-centric. In this study we seek to examine whether cohesion varies significantly across rural and urban contexts and whether place-based poverty is related to cohesion similarly in each context. We expand beyond local studies to use data from the 2016 Missouri Crime Victimization Survey (N = 1873), which contains strong rural and urban samples, and is broadly representative of the state of Missouri—a state in which the population is approximately 30 percent rural—to examine these questions. Descriptive statistics show the social cohesion index, neighbors’ willingness to help, and perceptions of them being close knit and trusted as being significantly higher in rural communities, but that perceptions that neighbors get along and share the same values did not significantly differ. Local poverty significantly predicted one item, trust, in rural communities and the cohesion index and all of its components in urban communities. After including controls, coefficients on poverty retained significance for trust in rural communities and for four of six outcomes in urban ones, but they did not differ significantly across groups in equality of coefficients tests. Poverty was most strongly and consistently associated with perceptions of trust in both locales. Results contribute to a more refined understanding of the ways that social cohesion is conceptualized in different places, and the extent to which poverty plays into residents’ perceptions.

尽管在社会学和相关学科中存在着长期的思想，使农村生活变得更加公共和和谐，但是人们对于在农村和城市地区定义或分布社会凝聚力的方式知之甚少。基于对城市邻里不平等和集中劣势的学术研究以及后来的集体效能理论的分支，基于地点的凝聚力研究主要以城市为中心。在本研究中，我们试图检验在城市和乡村环境中凝聚力是否存在显着差异，以及在每种情况下基于地点的贫困是否与凝聚力相关。我们不仅仅局限于本地研究，还使用了2016年密苏里州犯罪受害者调查（N = 1873）中的数据，其中包含大量的农村和城市样本，并广泛代表密苏里州-该州的人口约占农村人口的30％-来研究这些问题。描述性统计数据显示，社会凝聚力指数，邻居的帮助意愿以及对他们的亲密感和信任感在农村社区中明显较高，但对邻居相处并享有相同价值观的看法并没有显着差异。当地贫困显着预测了农村社区的一项信任，以及城市社区的凝聚力指数及其所有组成部分。在加入控制措施之后，贫困系数对于农村社区的信任和城市六项结果中的四项仍然具有重要意义，但在系数均等测试中，各组之间的差异并不显着。贫穷与两个地区的信任感最强烈且始终如一地相关。结果有助于人们对不同地方的社会凝聚力的概念化方式以及贫困在多大程度上影响居民的认知程度进行更深入的了解。