Civic Engagement

Regarding to the divergence among different findings, we will mention the limits of previous findings and attempt to provide some possible explanations. First of all, the reasons that lead to diminishing civic engagement and social connectedness may also lead to social isolation, which is able to increase social participation for some certain communities. In the previous section, Putnam mentioned a phenomenon that people have been getting less and less involved in social activities. The social capital has been diminishing. To explain this phenomenon, he raised four reasons which were about the social, demographic and technological development. However, the later studies pointed out that the civic engagement actually varied in different neighborhoods.

With more mobility, people can move in to or out from different places with lower costs. Also, there have been more and more immigrants in American society right now. The diversity of the society has been actually increasing in a broad view. On the other hand, different communities have been growing into more mature ones during the same time. People with similar income levels and social activities are more likely to be in one community. Rankin and Quane mentioned that due to the loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs during 1970s and the shift toward jobs requiring more education and higher skill levels, there were huge growth of concentration of poverty in many inner-city neighborhoods. In those neighborhoods, most of them were a mix of poor working-class and middle-class blacks. With higher poverty level, the criminal rates increase so that the social isolation level keeps growing. Then the bond within one community becomes stronger so that people are able to, or more likely to participate in the community events. Putnam focused on the broad view but he did not make it detailed for different

It saved a great amount of time of doing face-to-face interview. In addition, it allowed the sample group to come up with an answer easily – the answer to the question could be the first answer that jumped out of mind. However, there are actually many different kinds of questions. There could be “how do you like my haircut”, “what are we going to eat for dinner” or “what do you think if I change a job”. To some random person, all these questions could be important, but he/she may ask these questions to different people. He/she can ask close friends about relationship issues and dressing opinions while he/she can ask parents or godparents about decision making and job changing. According to Rankin and Quane, “social interaction in workplaces, churches, and other social groupings increasingly takes place outside the neighborhood”(Rankin & Quane, p4). With a changing social grouping, it seems questionable to define a person’s social relationship from the question which is simply asking whom he/she will run to when there is a problem. In this case, it is quite questionable that whether the research method is still useful given that the social structures and groupings have been