May 8, 2009
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - As the old Beatles song goes, you get by with a little help from your friends. But to get ahead in life, you need more than that, says University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Professor Mark LaGory, Ph.D., who teaches in the UAB Department of Sociology. LaGory is one of the presenters at the one-day conference, "Impact of Poverty on Our Community," set for Monday, May 11, at the UAB Hill University Center, Great Hall, 1400 University Blvd. The event is sponsored by the UAB School of Public Health.
LaGory studies a concept called social capital, the everyday social connections made through civic involvement and mutually beneficial friendships and family relations. It is the network of friends and acquaintances that helps one to solve life's problems.
According to past research, the greater the network of friends and family one has, the healthier a person is, the higher their general well-being and the greater their sense of mastery over their environment, LaGory said. At least, that is how it's supposed to work.
Bonding and Bridging
But LaGory says there are two kinds of social capital - bonding and bridging. Bonding social capital involves friends with similar backgrounds while bridging social capital involves ties to people unlike oneself, usually acquaintances outside of friends and family. While bonding social capital helps people to get by in life, bridging social capital helps one to get ahead.
"Bridging involves someone who can be a bridge to new kinds of resources that are beyond what you can find in your own neighborhood or community," LaGory said. "Examples of this would be someone who has contacts at city hall or to a particular job market."
The difference between bonding and bridging social capital was made evident when LaGory and a colleague studied the Woodlawn and South Woodlawn neighborhoods.
"We found, in fact, that the more social capital a person has, the poorer their health," LaGory said. "But what we realized is that in these highly concentrated, poor minority areas, there are limited resources, so when someone has a large pool of friends, it's likely that a lot of these friends will have a lot of emergency situations and needs. And so the more friends one has, the more likely they will be sought out for help. The result is that friendship networks tend to be obligation networks in high-poverty areas.
"Unfortunately, bridging resources are extremely limited because of the political and economic climate in the United States and particularly in Birmingham over the last 30 years," LaGory said. "During this period, one of the kinds of neighborhoods that has grown the fastest is minority ghettoes with high concentrations of poverty. The communities are so highly segregated that it's difficult for people to have networks and social ties that go beyond the neighborhood itself."
The one ray of hope in Birmingham, says LaGory, is the faith community. "If faith communities take the initiative to address the neighborhood disadvantages of poverty, particularly denominational churches where there is diversity of a congregation, they can help leverage resources for the poor and build the bridging capital to help people not just simply to get by, but get ahead," he said.
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