Local Community Ties, Community-Boundedness, and Local Public Affairs Knowledge Gaps

Abstract

This study focused on the roles that community integration and community-boundedness (the relevance of a topic for a specific community) play on knowledge gaps. Given the extensive evidence linking media exposure with community ties, the authors hypothesized that ties with the local community could potentially mitigate local public affairs knowledge gaps. They also examined if the relevance of a topic to a subgroup would lead to lower knowledge gaps. A survey of 661 residents of Franklin County, Ohio, showed that whereas community ties were unrelated to knowledge, community-boundedness could be an important determinant of knowledge gaps on local public affairs. Additional analysis of the data also suggests that length of association with the community could be a potentially important contingent condition in the amelioration of knowledge gaps. The authors argue that their findings extend traditional findings of knowledge gaps that apply to geographically defined communities to studying “communities without propinquity.”