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Toward a Better Understanding of Perceptions of Neighborhood Social Cohesion in Rural and Urban Places

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. T-tests for the difference in means across rural and urban samples for social cohesion index and its components were similar in supplementary analyses without imputed data excepting that the difference in the index was marginally significant (p < .061). T-tests for the difference in means across rural and urban samples for control variables were all similar.

  2. Supplementary analyses that did not use multiple imputation had a few differences in tests of equality of coefficients for poverty coefficients across groups. Specifically, the difference in rural versus urban coefficients on poverty was only significant at the p<.05 level for “get along” and was not significant for other differences. Thus, the main substantive difference was that in the index itself. This is likely due to sample size changes from utilizing multiple imputation. Significance of the coefficients themselves were similar.

  3. In supplementary analyses that did not use multiple imputation that the coefficients for poverty in predicting “willing to help” and “close knit” were not significant for this urban sample, a change due to sample size (n=732 without multiple imputation versus 1010 with multiple imputation). The coefficient for poverty was marginally significant for “get along” (versus not significant).

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Funding

This work was supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Justice; Bureau of Justice Statistics; Missouri Department of Public Safety—Missouri State Highway Patrol Statistical Analysis Center.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Eileen E. Avery & Joan M. Hermsen

  2. Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

    Danielle C. Kuhl

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  1. Eileen E. Avery
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Avery, E.E., Hermsen, J.M. & Kuhl, D.C. Toward a Better Understanding of Perceptions of Neighborhood Social Cohesion in Rural and Urban Places. Soc Indic Res 157, 523–541 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02664-0

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