College Student Views of Community Vitality Through the Image and the Word

Abstract

For family and consumer sciences (FCS) professionals, understanding the individual differences in how communities are defined is integral to serving others. This exploratory study, designed to explore college students' perceptions of community vitality, compared and contrasted their perceptions through the image and the word. The sample consisted of 112 Gen Z and Millennial students enrolled in FCS courses at a West coast university. Via an online survey platform, subjects were asked to upload an image of anything or anyone that they felt illustrated their personal sense of community vitality. Subjects were asked how many communities they belong to and they were asked to name and list the top three communities with which they identified. Through content analysis, images were analyzed for their representations of community vitality and compared with the subjects' reported community identity. Three major categories emerged in the images, which showed parity for two categories (groups of people, and campus groups/connections). For this sample, the sense of community membership is quite high with all students associating with three or more groups. Although the sample size was narrow, responses support the importance of group association and community vitality to participants' well-being.