I am particularly pleased to see this paper in print, it took fifteen years and the help of over 50 research assistants to collect the data for this study. This paper started as a pet project the year my wife and I moved to Boston. That year, there was an article in the Boston Globe about a woman in Montreal who was attacked on a street and left unaided by passerbys. The Globe suggested that despite Canadians reputations, maybe Americans were now more altruistic. A hypothesis ripe for testing! Replicating an approach often associated with the famed social psychologist Stanley Milgram, with much assistance, I set out to “lose” nearly 4,000 letters in 62 urban areas in the US and Canada. The return rate served as a measure of helping/altruistic behavior. In 2001, the data confirmed a statistical tie. But, the end of data collection in 2001 also marked the horrible events of 9/11. It was immediately clear that this was an opportunity to measure how one of the most tragic events in American history might change community helping behavior. I sat on the data for ten years, returning to the field in 2011 and replicating the study in the same 63 urban areas. I expected to find a spike in helping behavior in the United States. Surprisingly, there had been a 10% decline in altruistic behavior in the United States relative to Canada. And, the decline was especially strong in those communities where the proportion of non-citizens had increased. Even more surprisingly, the trend was in the opposite direction in Canada. Since 2001, areas of Canada where the proportion of non-citizens increased experienced an increase in altruistic/helping behavior. What changed over that decade? One of the most obvious is the divergence in Canadian and US attitudes and policy towards immigrants. Canadian public opinion and the political rhetoric towards immigrants and diversity in general is much more positive than in the US. While Canada has institutionalize policies aimed at inclusion, valuing diversity, and a relatively speedy path towards citizenship, the US has not. Unintended evidence of how intolerance can hurt us all, while policies of inclusion and respect for diversity can lift us up. I discuss the implications of this trend a little further in an op-ed on why we should Stop blaming Facebook for Trump’s election win that was published in The Hill.
You can download the final version of the paper here, or access a draft version of the paper on my website.
A new paper with two of my PhD students, Weixu Lu and Inyoung Shin, is now in print. This paper on the relationship between use of digital technologies (i.e., social media, internet use, Facebook, mobile phones) and social and psychological stress expands on a report we released with the Pew Research Center.
This research explores the relationship between the use of digital media and stress. Based on the findings of a national, probability sample of adults in the United States, the use of digital media was not directly associated with higher levels of psychological stress. Some uses of digital media were associated with lower levels of perceived stress for women but not for men. However, the evidence suggests that, for men and women, digital media provides heightened awareness of network life events (AoNLE) in the lives of both close and more distant acquaintances. An
awareness of undesirable, major life events in the lives of others can be a source of psychological stress; this is the cost of caring. Thus, the link between digital media and stress is indirect. We argue that the growth of digital media is related to changes in the structure of peoples’ personal communities that contribute to this trend. There has been a shift toward networks that offer persistent contact and pervasive awareness. Findings suggest that different mobile technologies, Internet technologies, and social media afford AoNLE for men and women, but women tend to report greater psychological stress than men, and they experience psychological stress from a wider range of AoNLE. We discuss explanations for the negative relationship between technology
use and stress for women, as well as the implications of our findings for research on the use of digital media and psychological well-being, such as the relationship to social support, narcissism and empathy.
You can download the final version of the paper here, or access a draft version of the paper on my website.
Inyoung Shin and I are now expanding on this work, creating a more expansive and parsimonious measure for awareness of network life events, and we are exploring other outcome measures.
The special issue of American Behavioral Scientist edited by myself and Vikki Katz is now in print. Vikki and I put together this issue based on a workshop we organized during the 2014 meeting of the National Communication Association. We bring together a great set of authors who intersect in the areas of community, digital media, and urban studies. The issue is relevant for anyone studying new media, virtual community, social networks, urban sociology, urban planning, or community and urban informatics. In our introduction to the issue we argue that:
The split between sociology and communication has had consequences for scholars in both fields. As these traditions moved further from each other, sociologists concerned with local ecologies, place, and “neighborhood effects” have generally neglected the role of media and variation in access to communication technology. Researchers who have focused on media, information, and communication processes have neglected the role of place and have decoupled communication technologies from the contexts in which people use them. This schism has inhibited the advancement of a common interest to understand the factors that influence social integration. This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist intends to bridge the gap between research by scholars in sociology and those in communication, information, and media studies about the role of new technologies in everyday life.
Contributions include:
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
The Chicago School and Ecology: A Reappraisal for the Digital Era
Lewis A. Friedland
Networks in Place
Jeffrey Lane
The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem
Vikki S. Katz and Carmen Gonzalez
Community Variations in Low-Income Latino Families’ Technology Adoption and Integration
Yong-Chan Kim and Eui-Kyung Shin
Localized Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Seoul’s Urban Neighborhoods
Keith N. Hampton
Persistent and Pervasive Community: New Communication Technologies and the Future of Community
You can find the full issue here.