Community, opportunity, and crime on school property: A quantitative case study

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bickel, Robert, Dufrene, Roxane

Clearly, there is no statistical basis for making inferences to other areas. We are working with population data from one state, rather than a probability sample selected from a larger universe. As a result, grounds for generalizability must be substantive rather than statistical, based on the likelihood that the social circumstances which make community and opportunity powerful contextual factors in our West Virginia analysis would also hold in other places.

Community: Substantive Grounds for Generalizability

The problematic nature of generalizability is highlighted by the central role played by the concept community. Community is difficult to define and measure in a generally applicable way (Miller, 1991). Why should community mean the same thing in a poor, distinctively rural, ethnically insular, Appalachian border state such as West Virginia as it does anywhere else?

Community, as we have used the concept, is a durable network of holistic social relationships which reinforces a shared set of expectations, comfortably routine interaction patterns, and a common outlook. Community is a place where members take it for granted that most of their social encounters will be with people who have lived similar lives and who see things much as they do (Cummings, 1998).

If a sense of safety, stability, social cohesion, and a shared world view pervade the community, students bring this with them to school. It provides a basis for inschool community, a secure and hopeful environment where students are not socially isolated and culturally adrift. Instead, this kind of school environment affords the social and cultural certainty, stability, and benign predictability in which learning can best occur (Spatig, Parrot, Carter, Kusimo, & Keyes, 2000).

Students' sensitivity to these traditional sources of predictability and safety is a primary reason why most of them, much as their parents, voice opposition to consolidation (Spatig, Parrot Carter, Kusimo, & Keyes, 2000; Bickel, Smith, & Eagle, 2001). Consolidation replaces their small schools with large ones where "no one knows your name... there are more fights... there are drugs and guns-kids bring guns to school! ... the individual does not matter" (quoted in Bickel, Smith, & Eagle, 2001: 12).

This way of thinking about both out-of-school and in-school community certainly does reflect the rural character of West Virginia. Notice, however, that in suitably abstract terms, the nature of a traditional community, as we have construed it here, seems universal rather than peculiar: a place that provides a reasonably predictable and hopeful future, in a socially and culturally agreeable location, where established and desirable occupational and familial roles are realistically accessible. This contrasts sharply with the "hard egotism, anonymous individualism, and narrow self-seeking" of social settings where markets have become the only sacred institutions and traditional community ties have been relegated to obsolescence (Novak, 1978: 69; Frank, 2000: 61-62 & 127-128).