"
. With Diversity and isolation
Posted Under: America
This is interesting:
What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?
This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes…
Still, in the long run, Putname figures: “If this country’s history is any guide, what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as “other” — can and does change over time.”
Here’s the writeup from the NYT Mag.
.
.
Kim Fellner's book 
.
A
Reader Comments
I know they say in the article that they looked at the study from all angles, and they counted in all factors. Obviously they’re very good researchers. But I keep getting hung up on the phrase “telephone survey.”
Is it possible that the people that you can reach for a telephone survey are the sort who are at home to answer phone calls, maybe because they have withdrawn into themselves, formed few friendships? And meanwhile, the sorts of people who do go out and attend the neighborhood barbecue are not around to be counted.
I realize you can control for a lot of things in setting up a survey, but I don’t know how you control for people not answering the phone.
I’m sorry I forgot to reply to this, and now who knows if you’ll see.
Anyway, I agree about the concerns over telephone surveys. It’s clearly an issue with a lot of polls. In this case, one might argue that the engaged person does answer the phone, returns calls, and might be particularly eager to talk.
Really, all such surveys are to be taken with a grain of salt. But I wouldn’t say that I find the restults of this one to be completely unlikely. Just a hunch.