Concentrated Disadvantage and Community Attachment

Assessing Wilson-Sampsonʼs Social Disorganization Theory through Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

The social environment of the urban communities, such as concentrated disadvantage, affects the lives of the people living there. This paper focuses on community attachment, which is “the strength of the emotional ties that residents have to their neighborhood.” If the attachment to one's neighborhood is influenced by factors specific to one's neighborhood, what factors might these be? Based on Wilson-Sampson's social disorganization theory of community as an analytical framework, we quantitatively clarified the determinants of community attachment. The data used in this paper were obtained from a survey of 50 school districts in the city of Nagoya. We used multilevel analysis, including variables at the neighborhood level. Our analysis revealed that people living in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods tended to have low attachments to their neighborhoods. The level of community disorder did not have a statistically significant association with community attachment. Contrarily, people living in areas with high average values of collective efficacy tended to be more attached to their neighborhoods when the variables such as the percentage of the population of newcomers are controlled. The results of this study are consistent with the analytical model based on Wilson-Sampson's social disorganization theory of communities. However, the small newcomer population size of the disadvantaged communities poses a discrepancy between the model and the results. We provide an interpretation based on the residential segregation in the city of Nagoya.