Overall "Sense of Community" in a Suburban Region

This article tests several hypotheses from sociology and psychology about the factors important to residents' overall "sense of community" in a suburban region. Using data from the 1990 Orange County (CA) Annual Survey, we found that 68% of residents lived in places that they described as having a sense of community. As hypothesized, the overall sense of community was greater when there was higher satisfaction with the amount of local participation in the community and higher satisfaction with privacy in the residential setting. We also found evident impacts of urbanization, in that residents living in larger, higher density and more ethnically diverse cities in a suburban region had a lower overall sense of community. The implications for suburban theory, research, and community design are discussed.

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