Toward a Better Understanding of Perceptions of Neighborhood Social Cohesion in Rural and Urban Places

Abstract

Despite longstanding ideas in sociology and related disciplines that hold rural life as being more communal and harmonious, little is known about the ways that social cohesion is defined or distributed in rural versus urban places. Stemming largely from scholarship on urban neighborhood inequality and concentrated disadvantage, as well as subsequent offshoots of collective efficacy theory, studies of place-based cohesion have been largely urban-centric. In this study we seek to examine whether cohesion varies significantly across rural and urban contexts and whether place-based poverty is related to cohesion similarly in each context. We expand beyond local studies to use data from the 2016 Missouri Crime Victimization Survey (N = 1873), which contains strong rural and urban samples, and is broadly representative of the state of Missouri—a state in which the population is approximately 30 percent rural—to examine these questions. Descriptive statistics show the social cohesion index, neighbors’ willingness to help, and perceptions of them being close knit and trusted as being significantly higher in rural communities, but that perceptions that neighbors get along and share the same values did not significantly differ. Local poverty significantly predicted one item, trust, in rural communities and the cohesion index and all of its components in urban communities. After including controls, coefficients on poverty retained significance for trust in rural communities and for four of six outcomes in urban ones, but they did not differ significantly across groups in equality of coefficients tests. Poverty was most strongly and consistently associated with perceptions of trust in both locales. Results contribute to a more refined understanding of the ways that social cohesion is conceptualized in different places, and the extent to which poverty plays into residents’ perceptions.