Community Matters
In the 1970s, Urie Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University revolutionized the study of child development in a number of ways.1 First, his studies made it clear that children’s development is affected by more than just their parents—though parents, especially parents of young children, don’t always feel that way; rather they feel that the responsibility of how their children turn out is all on them.
Not so, stated Bronfenbrenner. Children’s development is affected by the context of their lives—especially the relationships they have with other important people—their extended families, friends, people at school and in their community, people in their parents’ workplaces, and others. He and I often discussed the impact of parents’ work on kids.
Additionally, Bronfenbrenner’s theories broke new ground in showing that children aren’t passive recipients of what happens to them—children affect others who, in turn, affect them.
I have long been interested in communities because it’s clear to me that my community mattered in my growing-up years.
Even so, many researchers have continued to think of the impact of community on children in demographic terms such as how high-income or low-income a community is. So, you can imagine my excitement when I discovered studies about “collective efficacy” because these researchers were trying to identify and study exactly what made communities matter.
Collective efficacy is defined as the social cohesion among community members and their willingness to intervene with other people’s children on behalf of the common good. A few years ago, I sought out Felton “Tony” Earls, now retired from Harvard, one of the creators of this concept, to learn more. He began by describing what led him to this concept:
At the beginning of my career as a child psychiatrist in East Harlem in New York, it was very clear that characteristics of the neighborhood—positive and negative—were important in children’s lives.2
And these weren’t just the usual demographics, he said.
It didn’t matter so much what your income level was or what your race/ethnicity or immigration status was. They could be contributing factors, but it seemed possible that people might even feel insecure in certain kinds of wealthy neighborhoods. It was also conceivable that in a poor neighborhood there was a high level of sharing and social activity, and that children might feel very secure, despite the fact that people didn’t have fancy cars, fancy houses, or something like that.
He and Robert Sampson, then of the University of Chicago and now at Harvard, and others selected Chicago for a large-scale study that lasted more than a decade. They hypothesized that collective efficacy would be linked to positive outcomes,3 which they defined as community members trusting one another, sharing common values, and being willing to step in on behalf of the common good—such as supervising children and protecting the public order.4
The team compiled a comprehensive neighborhood-level data picture, including wealth, educational level, residential stability, crime rates, racial composition, immigration status, and much more.5 They made videotapes of the social activity and physical appearance of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago and surveyed about eight thousand community members. Earls describes the kind of questions they asked about collective efficacy:
Let’s say a young child needs help to cross a street. Is this the kind of neighborhood where it’s very likely or not likely that someone would intervene and help that child?
If you saw a child skipping school, spray-painting graffiti, disrespecting an older person—are you likely to hold back or respond to that?6
On the basis of these and other questions, each neighborhood was rated on its level of collective efficacy.
In a 1998 report for the U.S. Department of Justice, the researchers summarized their results: in neighborhoods scoring high on collective efficacy, crime rates were 40 percent below those in lower-scoring neighborhoods.7 No wonder a New York Times article calls one of the best studies in criminology ever.8
In their research articles, Earls, Sampson, and their colleagues are careful to state that “recognizing that collective efficacy matters does not imply that inequalities at the neighborhood level can be neglected.”9 The study found that collective efficacy did vary by neighborhood and was lower when community members were struggling with issues of poverty and immigration. Overall, the study found that “collective efficacy, not race or poverty, was the largest single predictor of the overall violent crime rate.”10
This study further concluded that there is no such thing as irredeemable “bad” kids. The well-being of every child depends on the child, the family, the school, and the community, including its collective efficacy.11
Velma McBride Murry of Vanderbilt University and her colleagues assess the impact of community in their longitudinal studies by looking at two concepts related to collective efficacy:
Community cohesion: a marker of how much support parents and adolescents feel they have from neighbors and whether they feel they can depend on neighbors if they need help.
Collective socialization: a marker of whether neighbors help raise other people’s children like their own.12
I grew up in a community like that, so my husband, Norman, and I wanted this kind of community when we had children. I asked three questions of the people in communities we were considering: (1) Can you be yourself in this community? (2) If you had an emergency at two in the morning, could you comfortably call your neighbors for help? (3) Would they help you, and would you help them? After searching for a long time we found a place where most people answered yes to these questions, and we’ve raised our children and grandchildren here. Rarely a day goes by when I’m not grateful for the place I call home for the support it provides to me and to my family.
Murry’s studies have found that having a supportive community is especially important for adolescent boys. She speculates that perhaps boys seek independence from their families earlier than girls, so they need people beyond their families watching out for them.13
In the late 1990s, I worked on a campaign with Rob Reiner to increase public awareness that the early years are foundational to children’s learning and development. The campaign leaders chose the name, “I Am Your Child,” which in many ways, was a nod to collective efficacy. We believed that we all have to feel some responsibility for each other’s children for generations of young children to fare well in life.
That said, collective efficacy may sound less and less achievable in today’s polarized world. To me, it is defined by the people in our children’s world, whether they live next door or not. It’s also defined by small, everyday acts of support and kindness.
I love the way Fred Rogers saw this, encapsulated as: “one kind word.”14 If a parent is having a hard time with their child in the supermarket, rather than rubbernecking—straining to see what’s happening like we do if there’s a car wreck on the road, we can smile and say one kind word to that parent, like “I’ve been there.” Or “I love how determined your child is. That’s a great quality.” That’s what my friends in this community did for me, especially during the teen years. We listened, we laughed at each other’s stories and we said one kind word.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32(7), 513–531, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.32.7.513.
Felton Earls, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 18, 2001.
Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277, no. 5328 (August 1997): 918–924, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918.
Felton Earls and Stephen L. Buka, “Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods,” Research and Technical Report, National Institute of Justice, March 1997; Felton Earls and Mary Carlson, Voice, Choice, and Action: The Potential of Young Citizens to Heal Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime.”
Felton Earls, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 18, 2001.
Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhood Collective Efficacy—Does It Help Reduce Violence?,” National Institute of Justice, last modified April 1998, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/184377NCJRS.pdf.
Dan Hurley, “Scientist at Work—Felton Earls; On Crime as Science (A Neighborhood at a Time),” New York Times, January 6, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/science/scientist-at-work-felton-earls-on-crime-as-science-a-neighbor-at-a-time.html.
Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime,” 923.
Ibid.
Earls and Buka, “Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.”
Velma McBride Murry et al., “Intervention Induced Changes in Perceptions of Parenting and Risk Opportunities Among Rural African Americans,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 23, no. 2 (February 2014): 422–436, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-013-9714-5; Velma McBride Murry, “Adolescent Development: Recovery and Repair,” Adolescent Virtual Speaking Series, Bezos Family Foundation, March 2, 2021; Velma McBride Murry, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 15, 2021.
Velma McBride Murry, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 15, 2021.
Fred Rogers, “The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember” (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 185.