Residents of low-income neighborhoods care more about their communities than residents of high-income neighborhoods, researchers found in a new study.
Residents of high-crime, low-income areas are often considered to have a "care a heck" type of attitude towards their communities. This may not entirely be true, suggest researchers from the University of Missouri. In a new study, researchers looked at the level of care, support and vigilance among residents living in high-crime, low-income areas and found that they care and support their communities much more than residents of high-income neighborhoods.
"We hypothesized that individuals with higher incomes would have higher levels of community care and vigilance, but the opposite was true," Mansoo Yu, an assistant professor of social work and public health at MU, said in a press statement. "Residents with lower incomes were more likely to care about their communities than their higher-earning neighbors."
The findings came as a surprise to authors who stated that one possible reason for this could be that most residents with such low incomes tend to stay in the same area for a longer period of time. This makes them grow more attached to their communities. However, this doesn't happen with residents of high-income neighborhoods as they have the money to shift from neighborhood to neighborhood that offer better standards of living along with being safer.
Yu suggests that community workers and organizers could use this characteristic of low-income neighborhood residents to encourage them in taking actions for the betterment of communities.
According to a U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the total number of working families who are categorized under low-income has increased from 28 percent in 2007 to 32.1 percent in 2011. The gap between the low-income working families and the nation's wealthy families is increasing.
"Healthy local environments are related to overall well-being and good mental and physical health," Yu continues. "Individuals tend to feel safer in their local communities when they have low levels of depression and high levels of self-esteem. More work is needed to improve low-income areas into healthy environments so individuals' well-beings can improve."
The study titled "Which Factor has More Impact? An Examination of the Effects of Income Level, Perceived Neighborhood Disorder, and Crime on Community Care and Vigilance Among Low-Income African American Residents," was published in Race and Social Problems.
