Civic engagement makes or breaks a community. Engagement can take many forms, whether it’s working with neighbors to create a welcoming environment in a neighborhood, voting for legislation to improve quality of life or volunteering through a community organization to help others. The key to effective citizen participation is social capital, defined by social scientists as social networks characterized by norms of trust and reciprocity. This idea of social capital is of great interest to Dr. Michael Stout, associate professor of sociology at Missouri State University, who conducts research on community and economic development in order to better understand the ways social capital and civic engagement serve as resources that provide access to opportunities.
Using the community as a laboratory for his research, Stout, along with colleagues Drs. John Harms and Tim Knapp, conducted a series of community assessments investigating how social connectedness, membership in voluntary associations, and participation in the community are related to economic opportunity. They published their research in two reports and have shared findings with community leaders and policy makers.
“We want to inform policy and bring people together around this idea that if we can weave together a civic infrastructure that is more inclusive, then more people will be empowered to have a voice in the future of their communities and their own lives, which will lead to better opportunities and outcomes for everybody,” said Stout.
In 2010, the group initiated a research project examining social capital and citizen participation in southwest Missouri. They found that people in the region tend to have many interpersonal connections, high levels of participation in voluntary groups (especially faith-based organizations) and high levels of trust in others. However, they also found that in the Ozarks there are relatively lower levels of civic engagement compared to the national average. The researchers felt that a lack of connections between diverse groups and social network homogeneity were a primary reason for this.
“Through my own community involvement, I hope to be a voice that encourages the development of policies that bridge those social cleavages in order to emphasize the common identity that we all share from living in the same community and work together to try to solve those problems,” Stout added.
The public affairs mission and its foundation in ethical leadership, community engagement and cultural competency drew Stout to the University, knowing that his research interests were completely in line with those ideals.
Stout, Harms and Knapp see their direct impact on the themes in Springfield’s long-range plan (the themes of minimizing poverty and increasing civic engagement) and know their work is helping the state of Missouri (they are working on the second ever State Civic Health Assessment).
Recently, the team collaborated in the Neighbor for Neighbor initiative, a pilot project in two Springfield neighborhoods that suffer from high levels of unemployment and poverty. Throughout the five-week course, trained facilitators bring together diverse representatives from each neighborhood, such as landlords, homeowners and renters, whites and nonwhites, older and younger generations, to have a dialogue about how economic hardships affect each of them, to identify the sources of those hardships, to envision an ideal neighborhood where opportunities are equitably distributed, to define action items or projects to work toward that vision, and to vote on the projects they want to pursue.
“The whole purpose is to empower people to help themselves. We are helping with resources, so they can become the communities that they want, but they’re taking those resources, targeting them at the right places to implement their ideas,” said Stout. “The idea is use small incremental changes to build trust, to increase social connectedness, and to empower people to work together to solve problems.”
In early 2012, Stout was also named one of the “50 Sociology Professors You Should Be Following on Twitter” by WorldWideLearn.com. You can follow him on Twitter @mikestout_msu.
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College of Humanities and Public Affairs
The College of Humanities and Public Affairs offers 16 undergraduate, eight graduate and six certificate programs. Departments in the college include criminology and criminal justice, defense and strategic studies, economics, history, military science, philosophy, political science, religious studies, sociology and anthropology. The department of defense and strategic studies is housed in the Washington, D.C. area. The college helps students understand social, political and legal structures, ethical principles, religious systems, and economic institutions and practices within a global, historical, and contemporary context.
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