COMMUNITY STUDIES

Community studies and its relevance for understanding contemporary social problem facing communities today



Community studies and its relevance for understanding contemporary social problem facing communities today

Introduction

Community studies is an academic field concerned with the study of community and the characteristics of particular localities. A key focus of many programs of community study is the effects of social change upon the form and function of social life within such specific settings. Unlike more theoretically oriented research on the concept of community, the field of community studies employs the methodological tools of the social sciences as a means by which to describe, contextualize, and investigate the sociocultural and psychological dynamics that affect everyday life in the community.

Research conducted on community in this sense is often directly concerned with the effects on social and economic life of such variables as family, youth, health, leisure, gender, employment, immigration, education, crime, poverty, and inequality. As such, community studies is often closely linked with policy implementation and analysis.

Community studies are an example of research practice associated with a single sociological concept, that of 'community'. Most commonly, community studies have comprised research into 'place communities', i.e. into the social relationships happening in human settlements. The research focus has been the local social systems in the area; these and the people in them being loosely referred to as a 'community'. Almost without exception, such community studies involve the researcher living during part of the duration of the project in the area whose residents are being studied. The methods of research are predominantly qualitative and characteristically ethnographic.

Discussion and Analysis

The concept of community can be used in many subtly different ways (Indicators and Operationalisations). Its core ideas are a network of relations between people, a shared sense of identity, a characteristic form of relationships, and - in place communities - a sense of locality. It is also possible to have 'interest communities', where members may not be located physically together but do share a social position in the wider society, and 'communities of attachment', where members share a sense of common identity (Anderson, 2000).

The popularity of the place community study has fluctuated with the changing fortune of the concept of community (Bobo, 2000). In the first half of the twentieth century, British sociology (and British social anthropology) was particularly interested in how human life in the form of social solidarities operated. What held societies together, and what did various social processes contribute to the functional coherence of the wider society? Later, more elaborate frames of reference became important, the discipline split into specialisms, and the idea that the social relationships in a small area could explain wider social patterns lost ground.

There have been three other main objections to community studies. It was argued that living together in a place did not automatically mean the existence of a community, and that small settlements had no closed social boundaries, being better understood as part of wider social and cultural systems (Bobo, 2000). Third, studies have typically concentrated narrowly on the lives ...