Get It Together, Do Something! Opinions About Handling Struggling Neighborhoods

• In Event: Class, Economic Inequality, & Public Opinion

Abstract

Northern European states function fairly well for most people in the sense that their neighborhoods are characterized by low unemployment, low crime levels and good schools, but, for a sizable minority of individuals, this picture of their local area is incomplete or even false. Instead, they live in areas where people are more likely to be unemployed, be crime victims – or be in the close proximity of crimes – and have children in poorly performing schools. In Sweden, as in many other societies in Europe, these areas tend to be inhabited by immigrants. Social scientists have spent considerable resources in examining why certain areas are struggling. However, less effort has been devoted to asking the people who live in the disadvantaged areas what they think are effective measures to improve living conditions. This paper addresses this issue by conducting repeated interviews with the same group of individuals who live in two ethnically diverse and struggling neighborhoods in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. The targeted neighborhoods are identified by the police as “particularly vulnerable”, along with four other local neighborhoods (15 percent of the Gothenburg population are living in a “vulnerable” neighborhood). The surveys are conducted in one of four different languages: Arabic, English, Somali or Swedish. Specifically, we study if there are systematic attitudinal dimensions in the perceived remedies based on 1) the belief that the state should address inequalities (“do something”) or 2) the belief that it is up to the individuals themselves to address the issues (“get it together”). Respondents’ beliefs are studied with exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. That is, we study if there are distinct dimensions of the perceived remedies of poorly performing neighborhoods or if these perceptions fall on one bi-polar dimension. In addition, we examine how the background factors of the respondents shape their perceptions of the solutions.

Authors

• Jacob Sohlberg, University of Gothenburg

• Peter Esaiasson, University of Gothenburg