Lamp Lighters and Sidewalk Smoothers: How Individual Residents Contribute to the Maintenance of the Urban Commons.

Research on collective efficacy in urban neighborhoods has focused predominantly on whether a community can regulate local behavior and spaces and less on how they do so. This study pursues the latter question by examining the social regularities that create collective efficacy, measured as the beha...

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Published in:American Journal of Community Psychology Vol. 58; no. 3/4; pp. 391 - 410
Main Author: T. O'Brien, Daniel
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Dec2016
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Dec2016
      vid: 58
      iid: 3/4
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      pub: Wiley-Blackwell
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        120943111
        10.1002/ajcp.12093
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        atl: Lamp Lighters and Sidewalk Smoothers: How Individual Residents Contribute to the Maintenance of the Urban Commons.
      aug:
        au: T. O'Brien, Daniel
        affil:
          School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA
          Boston Area Research Initiative, Northeastern & Harvard Universities, Boston MA, USA
      su:
        Community psychology
        Collective behavior
        Residents
        Neighborhoods
        Public spaces
        Metropolitan areas
        Psychology
      sug:
        subj:
          Community psychology
          Collective behavior
          Residents
          Neighborhoods
          Public spaces
          Metropolitan areas
          Psychology
      keyword:
        "Big data"
        “Big data”
        311 Hotlines
        Broken windows
        Collective efficacy
        Computational social science
        Social regularities
        "Big data"
        “Big data”
        311 Hotlines
        Broken windows
        Collective efficacy
        Computational social science
        Social regularities
      ab: Research on collective efficacy in urban neighborhoods has focused predominantly on whether a community can regulate local behavior and spaces and less on how they do so. This study pursues the latter question by examining the social regularities that create collective efficacy, measured as the behavioral composition of a neighborhood (i.e., the extent to which each individual contributes to a social regularity). This perspective is applied to the database of requests for nonemergency government services received by Boston, MA's 311 system in 2011 (>160,000 requests). The analysis categorized custodians who have used the system to combat physical disorder in the public space (e.g., requesting graffiti removal) into two groups--"typical custodians" who have made one or two requests in a year, and "exemplars" who have made three or more. A neighborhood's collective efficacy in reporting public issues was identified through audits of sidewalk quality and streetlight outages. Analyses revealed a collaborative model of maintenance in which typical and exemplar custodians were each necessary and non-substitutable. A second analysis found that the two types of custodian were associated with different contextual factors, articulating two different pathways from demographic and social characteristics to collective efficacy, suggesting implications for theory and practice.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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