Wider-community Segregation and the Effect of Neighbourhood Ethnic Diversity on Social Capital: An Investigation into Intra-Neighbourhood Trust in Great Britain and London.

James Laurence

doi:10.1177/0038038516641867

Abstract

Extensive research has demonstrated that neighbourhood ethnic diversity is negatively associated with intra-neighbourhood social capital. This study explores the role of segregation and integration in this relationship. To do so it applies three-level hierarchical linear models to two sets of data from across Great Britain and within London, and examines how segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested impacts trust amongst neighbours. This study replicates the increasingly ubiquitous finding that neighbourhood diversity is negatively associated with neighbour-trust. However, we demonstrate that this relationship is highly dependent on the level of segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested. Increasing neighbourhood diversity only negatively impacts neighbour-trust when nested in more segregated wider-communities. Individuals living in diverse neighbourhoods nested within integrated wider-communities experience no trust-penalty. These findings show that segregation plays a critical role in the neighbourhood diversity/trust relationship, and that its absence from the literature biases our understanding of how ethnic diversity affects social cohesion.

Highlights

The question of how ethnic diversity affects societal cohesion has received considerable attention, stemming from studies suggesting that diversity can harm social capital (Putnam, 2007)
After accounting for how diverse neighbours are in the immediate neighbourhood, segregation across the wider-community in which the neighbourhood is nested could have an additional effect on trust between those same neighbours
This study investigates the role of segregation across wider-communities in the neighbourhood-diversity/neighbour-trust relationship

Summary

Introduction

The question of how ethnic diversity affects societal cohesion has received considerable attention, stemming from studies suggesting that diversity can harm social capital (Putnam, 2007). While attention has focused on how the level of ethnic diversity affects social capital, far less has been paid to segregation. This is a substantial omission given segregation is ‘arguably the “structural linchpin” of ... Studies have begun exploring how segregation across cities affects generalised trust (Rothwell, 2012; Uslaner, 2012); almost no research has examined the role of segregation in the relationship between neighbourhood diversity and within-neighbourhood social capital ( see Sturgis et al, 2013). Given diversity’s apparent negative effects appear most consistent within neighbourhoods, such an omission requires addressing

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