1,721,023 research outputs found
Being involved in the neighborhood through people-nearby applications: a study deepening their social and community-related uses, face-to-face meetings among users, and local community experience
No full textPeople-Nearby Applications (PNAs) social and community-related uses could represent an alternative way to live urban spaces and sociability when citizens experience offline constraints in doing so in their city or neighborhood. Indeed, the features of PNAs suggest that they could represent reliable tools to glue local social fabrics, enhancing their local community experience. Thus, this study aims at deepening whether PNAs social (i.e., for friendship/network) and specifically community-related (i.e., for location-based searching of new people to meet) uses can improve citizens’ local community experience through fostering face-to-face meetings with other users nearby and a more involved way of living their neighborhoods at last. An online questionnaire was administered to 302 Italian PNAs users. The results show that only PNAs the community-related use associates with more frequent face-to-face meetings with other users nearby and with a more involved way of living one’s neighborhood via this frequency. Conversely, no significant association emerged for PNAs social use. These results suggest that PNAs can improve users’ local community experience as they seem able to enhance local social relationships and their users’ feeling of involvement in their neighborhood through fostering new local acquaintances and interactions and further opportunities to live local common places and socialize. Moreover, this supports the insights about PNAs role and potentialities as an alternative path to rely on for users having unmet aggregative needs yet experiencing constraints in straightly living their neighborhood through enjoying urban spaces and local sociability
Quale convivenza nella zona stazione di Reggio Emilia? le interviste a testimoni privilegiati
No full textEnvironmental mastery and purpose of life during COVID-19-related lockdown: A study deepening the role of personal and community resilience
No full textCOVID-19 outbreak and the measures needed to contain its first wave of contagion produced broad changes in citizens' daily lives, routines, and social opportunities, putting their environmental mastery and purpose of life at risk. However, these measures produced different impacts across citizens and communities. Building on this, the present study addresses citizens' understanding of the rationale for COVID-19-related protective measures and their perception of their own and their community's resilience as protective dimensions to unravel the selective effect of nationwide lockdown orders. An online questionnaire was administered to Italian citizens during Italian nationwide lockdown. Two moderation models were performed using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) path analysis. The results show that the understanding of the rationale for lockdown only associated with citizens' purpose of life and that it represented a risk factor rather than a protective one. Furthermore, the interaction effects were significant only when community resilience was involved. That is, personal resilience did not show the expected moderation effect, while community resilience did. However, the latter varied between being either full or partial depending on the dependent variable. In light of the above, the theoretical and practical implications of these results will be discussed
Local Community Experience as an Anchor Sustaining Reorientation Processes during COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFIn recent months, Italian citizens have alternatively experienced a forced, total or partial, loss of their opportunities to go out and meet their social network or their reduction, according to the restrictions locally needed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. The effects of these unprecedented circumstances and restrictions on their local community experience are still to be deepened. Consequently, this study investigated young citizens’ experiences of and attitudes towards their local communities of belonging after ten months of alternatively strict and partially eased restrictions. The World Café methodology was used to favor the exchange of ideas and open new viewpoints among participants. What emerged suggests that the communities of belonging may have worked as anchors to which young citizens clung as an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the disorientation brought about by the loss of their daily life (e.g., routines, life places, face-to-face sociability). On the one hand, this suggests that a renewed focus on local communities and a more involved way of living in them may stem from this tough time. On the other hand, these results point out the need for more meaningful and actively engaged people–community relationships as drivers for recovery processes under emergency circumstances
Sense of responsible togetherness, sense of community, and civic engagement behaviours: Disentangling an active and engaged citizenship
Get PDFLocal communities should represent entities where individuals get answers to their affiliation needs and for which they feel responsible, but in modern ones, increasingly complex ways of living together are fostering citizens' civic and social disengagement. The present study addresses the relationships between the cognitive, affective, and behavioural components of an active and engaged citizenship. Five hundred and fifty-five Italian citizens answered an online questionnaire about their Sense of Responsible Togetherness, Sense of Community, and Civic Engagement Behaviours. The results support Sense of Community as a mediator in the relationship between Sense of Responsible Togetherness and civic engagement behaviours, suggesting that the representations about community members being active and responsible, and having opportunities to meet and match, could at the same time strengthen their tie to that community and foster their civic engagement for it. This could set up a cycle of enhancement and empowerment for individuals and communities through increasing the opportunities for local generative interactions and civic engagement
Identity and Immigrant Stereotypes: A Study Based on the Ego-Ecological Approach
No full textBased on the ego-ecological approach, which views identity as deeply interconnected with the social environment via group memberships, this study reconstructed the psychosocial identity of a group of Sri Lankan immigrants who settled in Naples, Italy, with the aim of detecting resonances between their self-representations and the stereotypes circulating in the receiving society. Fifty-one Sri Lankan immigrants completed a shortened version of the Multistage Investigator of Social Identity (MISI) with the following two stimulus groups: “Sri Lankans” (i.e., ethnocultural identity) and “immigrants.” Analyses revealed an implication of the self in both groups (i.e., Sri Lankans and immigrants), with the represented immigrant self more negatively connoted than the ethnocultural self. The contents of the self-representations showed resonances with both the stereotypes associated with immigrants in Italian society and the specific stereotype associated with the Sri Lankan community, thereby empirically confirming that in the immigrant experience identity feels the effect of the attitudes of the receiving context
- …
