The process of community involvement

Abstract

The role of communication in community processes has long been recognized by philosophers and social theorists and has been a topic of research for a century or more. That research has been conducted under the influence of theories that questioned the viability of community in industrial, urban societies. The relevant evidence has been taken to be the degree to which people develop ties of one sort or another to the places they live and the institutions and people there. One such tie is community involvement, conceived as a communicative link to community process. The current approach offers an interpretation of community involvement as a process with a number of distinct steps. This idea is explored using data from a representative sample survey of 400 adult Iowans. Log‐linear analysis techniques are used to evaluate a number of latent class scale models. The best fitting model is quite different from the usual Guttman models that previously have been used in measuring community involvement. A number of substantive conclusions with implications beyond the community ties literature are discussed.