The effect of network neighbourhood context on adolescents’ community attachment

• In Event: 4167 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Children & Youth Roundtable 3: Institutional Contexts

Abstract

This study examines adolescents’ perceptions of and experiences in the residential community and how these might be shaped by their peer groups to foster their community attachment. Personal perceptions and experiences of community are factors determining one’s level of community attachment, which emphasizes individuals’ feelings of belonging to the community. To capture how community attachment is fermented among adolescents, predominant approaches emphasize individual level of factors, including emotional attachment and belongingness, sense of mattering integration and fulfillment of needs, as well as personal attributes to create sense of community. However, the potential role of structural level of analysis, like social influence through friendship network, in enhancing adolescents’ perceptions and generalized feelings toward their living community remains less unexplored. We examine the influence effect from friendship network structure that can inform and enrich community attachment. Specifically, we explore a framework of social network theory as a conceptual tool for detecting the path of influencing others through two-level of network structure. The data collection is based on Taiwan nationwide in-school adolescent population from junior high school and high school first-year students in 2015. The total analyzed sample size was 1,062. Results from hierarchical linear models show that individual experiences are crucial factors, but the context of sub-group network structure also helps explaining the level of personal community attachment significantly. That is, the effect of adolescent’s close friends was statistically significant on fostering the youth’s community attachment.

Authors

• Chih-Yao Chang, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts

• Chyi-In Wu, Academia Sinica