주민자치조직의 지역공동체 의식에 관한 연구

Abstract

Since the restoration of the self-governance system in 1995, Korea has been striving to stabilize the implementation of the local government system and expand local autonomy to overcome the limitations of representative democracy. In 1998, a local self-governance committee was established and operated to reflect the needs of residents through participation and communication at the town, village, and district levels, which are the basic units of local self-governance, but it did not achieve its purpose. Therefore, in 2010, a special law was enacted to expand the scope of resident participation, which was a limitation of resident autonomy committees. The purpose of the Act was to establish an efficient public service system by expanding residents' participation and restoring local traditional communities. This study sought to verify the effectiveness of the neighborhood association conversion policy by comparing the sense of community in neighborhoods that were converted to neighborhood associations and those that were not converted to neighborhood associations.
 Quantitative research was used as the research method, and the research model and hypotheses were derived through theoretical discussions on major factors such as residents' self-governance capacity as an independent variable and community consciousness as a dependent variable. A survey tool was utilized to measure residents' sense of community. Questionnaires were distributed to residents visiting 44 administrative wards in Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do, and the collected questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS version 27.0. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, correlation, and multiple regression analysis were performed on the collected survey responses.
 The results of the study showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the level of residents' sense of community between neighborhood councils and neighborhood committees. This suggests that the policy of converting neighborhood committees into neighborhood associations had an unexpected effect, resulting in a policy error. In order to improve the sense of community and restore traditional neighborhoods, it is necessary to increase the level of residents' ‘local attachment’, ‘local identity’, and ‘sense of fulfillment’. It is also necessary to verify the professional competence of community council members to ensure their representation. In addition, it will be possible to overcome the limitations of representative democracy by solving local problems with residents through connecting with local resources and community organizations.