Researching contemporary communities: concepts, methods

and policy implications 29 November 2011

Operationalising the concept of community

Graham CrowSociology and Social Policy

Faculty of Social and Human SciencesUniversity of Southampton

Operationalising the concept of community

The support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for this project 'Conceptualisations and meanings of "community": the theory and operationalisation of a contested concept' (Ref AH/J501375/1) is gratefully acknowledged.

One of 44 literature reviews and scoping studies funded as part of the ‘Connected Communities’ initiative

Project team Graham Crow and Alice Mah (now University of Warwick)

Operationalising the concept of community

5 traditional criticisms of community research

Too parochial Too static Too positive Too descriptive Too prosaic Methodological developments involved in

recent developments addressing these issues

Operationalising the concept of community

Too parochial? Focus on locality neglects global dimension One response has been to focus on streets James Attlee, Isolarion: A Different Oxford

Journey (2007), focus on the Cowley Road Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (2008),

focus on 30 households ‘almost all’ in an ordinary street in South London: ‘Never before have so many people from such diverse backgrounds been free to mix, and not to mix, in close proximity to each other’ (p.3)

Suzanne Hall (reproduced in Les Back, 2009), on the Walworth Road in London

Relevance to transnational communities

Operationalising the concept of community

Too static? Talja Blokland (2003) Urban Bonds: Social

relationships in an inner-city neighbourhood (Rotterdam)

Clark, Andrew (2008) Walking, Talking, Thinking, Doing: Reflections on the use of walking interviews to understand community http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1156/

Douglas Harper (2001) Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture

Operationalising the concept of community

Operationalising the concept of community

Tim Butler with Garry Robson (2003) London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Re-making of Inner London

Mike Savage et al (2005) Globalization and Belonging, on middle-class geographical mobility and ‘elective belonging’

Geoff Dench et al (2006) The New East End, re-study of 1957 classic, focus on expansion of Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets

Operationalising the concept of community

Too positive? Response to Geoff Payne’s question ‘Why are

community studies so full of nice people?’ Geoff Dench et al one of many studies to focus

on ethnic conflict Ambition to give voice to Tower Hamlets’

different communities (plural) ‘the local granny – the archetypal East End

“Mum” and heroine of Family and Kinship in East London’ to the research team’s surprise ‘turned out in the survey to be the most hostile of all to Bangladeshis’

Operationalising the concept of community

In a section of the book entitled ‘marginal men and disappearing fathers’, the comment is made that ‘Tony Hicks…. considered himself to be something of a New Man, on the basis that his teenage children came to stay on a Saturday night. But his use of time did not appear seriously impeded by parenting’. Consequently he was bracketed with another male respondent who ‘fell well short of the role-reversing house-husband which he liked to regard himself as being’. He is criticised for putting ‘impersonal causes’ ahead of ‘personal ones involving his own family’

Operationalising the concept of community

Eric Lassiter et al (2004) The Other Side of Middletown

Collaborative ethnography revisiting Muncie, Indiana, to include a part of the community previously excluded from generations of research, the town’s African Americans, a decision informed by the pursuit of an idealised ‘middle America’

‘Don’t drink champagne if you’re on a beer budget’

Operationalising the concept of community

Other dimensions of giving voice to groups previously neglected by researchers include Chris Phillipson et al (2001) The Family and Community Life of Older People: Social networks and social support in three urban areas, and Mary Corcoran et al (2010) Suburban Affiliations: Social Relations in the Greater Dublin Area, includes ‘a child’s view of the suburban world’

Operationalising the concept of community

Too descriptive? Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson (2009)

Sleepwalking to Segregation? Challenging myths about race and migration tackles head on Trevor Phillips’ thesis by, amongst other methods, using census data to construct tables showing changes in the index of dissimilarity

Operationalising the concept of community

Nickie Charles et al (2008) Families in Transition: Social Change, Family Formation and Kin Relations returns to Swansea (previously studied in the 1960’s) to assess theories of individualisation

Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl (2006) Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today engages with debates about social capital and personal communities

Operationalising the concept of community

Lennart Rosenlund (2009) Exploring the City with Bourdieu: Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theories and methods to study the community

Mixed methods used in studying change in Stavanger, Norway, including multiple correspondence analysis

Operationalising the concept of community

Too prosaic? Responding to Ruth Glass’s criticism of

community studies as ‘the poor sociologist’s substitute for the novel’

Much recent research in community is undertaken using a mixed methods approach to capture the multi-faceted nature of community

E.g. Jeremy Brent’s account of a Bristol housing estate, Searching For Community (2009), includes autobiography; Bernard Capp’s When Gossips Meet (2003) looks at archival records of slander cases which give voice to ordinary people

Operationalising the concept of community

Most of the studies in in the annotated bibliography used a combination of two or more methods, with the following approximate breakdown of methods covered: 40 interviews, 24 ethnographies (or participant observation), 22 case studies, 23 policy analyses, 15 statistics or surveys, 14 discourse, media or textual analyses, 14 visual methods, 14 historical and archival methods, , 12 participatory methods, 7 focus groups, 6 network analyses, 6 online/virtual, 3 mobile methods, 2 GIS, 1 complexity, 1 ethnology, 1 ethnomethodology

Operationalising the concept of community

Many of these methods are not new (e.g. SNA) Nor are many of the underlying problems new:

‘contested, shifting, and unstable boundaries are a long-standing feature of communities, not something that arrived with the Internet’ (Hugh Mackay 2005: 134)

Eavesdropping on mobile ‘phone conversations raises some familiar ethical issues (Ling 2008: 21)

Combinations of methods important because people who have something in common do not necessarily have everything in common

Connected Communities research at the AHRC/ESRC interface

Operationalising the concept of community

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18qu4Te9j4

Operationalising the concept of community

Let us turn our thoughts todayTo Martin Luther KingAnd recognize that there are ties between usAll men and womenLiving on the EarthTies of hope and loveSister and brotherhoodThat we are bound togetherIn our desire to see the world becomeA place in which our childrenCan grow free and strongWe are bound togetherBy the task that stands before usAnd the road that lies aheadWe are bound and we are bound

James Taylor – Shed a Little Light

References: sources of slides

Slide 4: Rees, A. (1951) Life in a Welsh Countryside. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Slide 6: Hall, S. (2008) ‘Armed with our inexperience: a survey of the Walworth Road’, Street Signs, Autumn, 10-11.

Slide 8: Harper, D (2001) Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slide 10: Savage, M. et al (2005) Globalization and Belonging, London: Sage.

Slide 11: Dench, G. et al (2006) The New East End, London: Profile Books

References: sources of slides

Slide 15: Lassiter, E. et al (2004) The Other Side of Middletown. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Slide 18:Finney, N. and Simpson, L. (2009) ‘Sleepwalking into Segregation’? Bristol: Policy Press.

Slide 20: Spencer, L. and Pahl, R. (2006) Rethinking Friendship. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Slide 22: Rosenlund, L. (2009) Exploring the City with Bourdieu. Saarbrücken: VDM

References: other Ling, R. (2008) New Tech, New Ties: How mobile

communication is reshaping social cohesion. Cambridge, mass.: MIT Press.

Mackay, H. (2005) ‘New connections, familiar settings: Issues in the ethnographic study of new media use at home’, in C. Hine (ed.) Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg.

Payne, G. (1996) ‘Imagining the community’ in S. Lyon and J. Busfield (eds) Methodological Imaginations. Basingstoke: Macmillan