Urbanism and Neighboring.

Almost without exception, students of community life have held that the neighborhood as a basis for association disappears as the degree of urbanization increases. Simmel and Park provided the early theoretical basis; Bernard, McClenhan, Roper, Sweetser, and others, conducted early empirical studies which provided the factual basis for Wirth's later restatement of the Simmel-Park position. After this initial research, which could be characterized as "Chicago style," interest in the problem waned. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the problems of urbanization including studies of neighboring as well as other forms of social participation. On the basis of these theoretical statements and empirical studies, most students of the community have continued to point out that contacts with neighbors are less frequent and more superficial in the city than they are in the country. Unfortunately, however well conceived and well executed the empirical studies in this area have been, they do not provide a factual basis for the comparative statements given in most urban-sociology textbooks. The research has been confined to studies of one neighborhood, or two or more neighborhoods in the same city. In addition, none of the studies uses the same "valid" scale for populations from various points on a rural-urban continuum. The problem of testing the above hypothesis, i.e., that there is a negative relationship between urbanism and frequency or quality of neighborhood contacts, is two-fold: to develop a "valid" scale applicable to people located at any point along the urbanism continuum; and to interview a sample of people located at various points along that continuum. Work that tests this hypothesis and is aimed at solving both the problems outlined above is the interest of this paper. Because of the resurgence of interest in the area and a possibly wider use for the scale, it was decided to report these results even though the full work was completed almost eleven years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]