The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community

@article{Neal2014TheO,
  title={The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community},
  author={Zachary P. Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal},
  journal={American Journal of Community Psychology},
  year={2014},
  volume={53},
  pages={1-12}
}
Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect… 
View on Springer
msu.edu
101 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
8
Background Citations
43
Methods Citations
5
Results Citations
9

101 Citations

Making sense of ourselves and others: A contribution to the community-diversity debate

In recent years, a debate has played out concerning the relationship between two of Community Psychology's core values: promoting diversity and promoting a sense of community. To elaborate on this…

What is the role of sense of community in multiracial societies? A contribution to the community-diversity dialectic: A genetic psychology approach.

The article elaborates on the sociogenetic formation of SOC by examining the macro-level forces that participate in establishing what a community should be and who is entitled to be part of it.

COMMUNITY AND DIVERSITY 1 Diversity and Community Can Co-exist

It is found that diversity and highly clustered social networks, on the assumptions of social tie formation based on spatial proximity and homophily, are incompatible when agent features are immutable, and this holds even for multiple independent features.

Diversity and Community Can Coexist.

Diversity and highly clustered social networks are incompatible when agent features are immutable, and this holds even for multiple independent features, which implies that segregation based on immutable characteristics such as race can possibly be overcome by sufficient similarity on mutable characteristics based on culture.

Taking Stock of the Diversity and Sense of Community Debate.

This special section is to continue a discussion about diversity and community, both among the debate's initial contributors (Alex Stivala, Greg Townley, and Zachary Neal), as well as among others whose own work has touched on these issues.

Making Big Communities Small: Using Network Science to Understand the Ecological and Behavioral Requirements for Community Social Capital

The goals of this paper are to clarify two forms of social capital (bridging and bonding), explicitly link them to the structural characteristics of small world networks, and explore the behavioral and ecological prerequisites of its formation.

Community, Diversity, and Marginalization: An Ecological Construction of Immigrant Parenting within the U.S. Neoliberal Home and School Contexts

Abstract Although studies have explored issues related to the partnerships between immigrant families and mainstream schools, tenacious challenges of marginalization within education persist,…

Shared Communities: A Multinational Qualitative Study of Immigrant and Receiving Community Members.

Results indicated numerous similarities among the ways in which participants constructed PSOC in shared and nonshared communities, regardless of immigration/citizenship status, length of community residence, city, country, age, or gender.

Bridging the Dialectic: Diversity, Psychological Sense of Community, and Inclusion.

  • A. Brodsky
  • Psychology
    American journal of community psychology
  • 2017
The primary values of community psychology-building and supporting positive communities, social change, and social justice within a framework that recognizes the centrality of diversity, culture, inclusion, power, and privilege-actually bind diversity and community together.

Where is the Dialectic in the Community-Diversity Dialectic?

  • Jean L. Hill
  • Linguistics
    American journal of community psychology
  • 2017
Agent-based modeling has provided some interesting investigations of the hypothesis that there is a dialectical relationship between sense of community and diversity. A close look at those models…
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 51 REFERENCES

Reconcilable Differences? Human Diversity, Cultural Relativity, and Sense of Community

It is argued that systematic consideration of cultural psychology perspectives can guide efforts to address a community-diversity dialectic and revise SOC formulations that ultimately will invigorate community research and action.

Listening to Diversity Stories: Principles for Practice in Community Research and Action

Three broad Diversity Principles for Community Research and Action are described and offered as community psychology’s contribution to the growing literature on multicultural competence in psychology and suggest the value of the overarching stance of connected disruption.

On the Edge of Diversity: Bringing African Americans and Latinos Together in a Neighborhood Group

Reflections are expressed on the gaps between science and practice in diverse communities; the utility and limits of ethnography; the multiple ecological levels of influence on the community; dilemmas around a White male taking proactive stances while trying to empower a group consisting mostly of women of color.

Beyond the optimal contact strategy: a reality check for the contact hypothesis.

The authors critique some research practices that have come to dominate the field of contact and argue that these practices have limited the contact hypothesis both as an explanation of the intergroup dynamics of desegregation and as a framework for promoting social psychological change.

Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange,…

Psychological sense of community: Suggestions for future research

The research on psychological sense of community leads to few firm conclusions. Among these are the idea that psychological sense of community is context specific, must be understood as involving…

Diversity, Social Capital, and Cohesion

We review the bourgeoning literature on ethno-racial diversity and its alleged effects on public trust and cohesion in the context of the evolution of the concept of social capital and earlier claims…

Sense of Community : A Definition and Theory

For several years many of us at Peabody College have participated in the evolution of a theory of community, the first conceptualization of which was presented in a working paper (McMillan, 1976) of…

Human Diversity: Perspectives on People in Context

OVERVIEW: A PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN DIVERSITY. Toward an Overarching Framework for Diversity (E. Trickett, et al.). Our Similarities Are Different: Toward a Psychology of Affirmative Diversity (J.…

A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure

  • P. Blau
  • Psychology
    American Journal of Sociology
  • 1977
Social structure is conceptualized as the distributions of a population among social positions in a multidimensional space of positions. This quantitative conception of social structure is the basis…
...