Using the General Social Survey, the authors analyze trends in socializing with neighbors and with friends outside the neighborhood from 1974 to 1996. Consistent with arguments about a declining attachment to neighborhood, results show a linear trend toward less socializing within the neighborhood and more outside it. In addition, the data suggest that people are increasingly specializing in either neighborhood or extra neighborhood social ties. However, the evidence for less neighborhood socializing is slight. Also, inconsistent with some claims about neighborhoods, only mild evidence suggests that socializing at the neighborhood level is becoming more selective of certain social groups.

Our study has shown that the stress threshold model, as formulated by Speare, only works partially. Consistent with Speare's model, we have found that subjective satisfaction is a strong predictor of thoughts about moving. Thoughts about moving is a good predictor of actual mobility. There are, however, three major problems with the model: stress as measured by satisfaction is not a particularly good predictor of actual mobility, although it does have some indirect influence through thoughts about moving; the "structural" variables have a strong independent impact on the mobility process beyond satisfaction; the satisfaction variables have little influence in mediating the effects of structural variables on mobility thoughts and behavior. The question of why our results differ from Speare's cannot be definitively answered here. We believe that our research has certain virtues in its direct measurement of satisfaction with home and community and also its much larger sample of movers. Speare's sample may have the virtue of being more representative of a large urban population since it was drawn from all segments of Rhode Island. Yet, while our sample is selective of areas within Seattle, we believe it provides a good representation of a wide variety of residential environments. Overall, our results are more consistent with the other studies which have addressed these issues (Bach and Smith, 1977; Lee, 1978; Michelson, 1977; Newman and Duncan, 1979), although the methods and approaches are not identical. Some of these studies were reviewed in the first part of the paper. We believe that understanding of the attitudinal predictors of changing residence is roughly at the same stage as research in the early post-World War II period on the attitudinal correlates of fertility behavior among American women. Research such as the Princeton study (Westoff et al., 1961; 1963) demonstrated that a variety of social attitudes about home, family, work and childbearing correlated poorly with levels of fertility. In contrast, such variables as objective religious affiliation, educational attainment, and race were clear correlates of fertility behavior. We still do not fully understand why these structural variables are important but we know that they are key predictors of behavior.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

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This article analyzes whether neighborhood context or environment in Seattle influences dimensions of social ties among neighbors, independent of the individual attributes of residents such as home ownership and socio-economic status. Three dimensions of neighbor ties are examined: interaction, organizing collectively, and knowing about neighbors. A number of environmental attributes are considered, including the age of the housing, residential stability, levels of affluence, the presence of blacks and foreign born, the concentration of commercial areas (heterogeneous land use), and the degree of upkeep in the area. While many are correlated with neighbor ties, few have a strong relationship with neighbor ties when individual attributes are controlled statistically. We find, in addition, that the importance of context varies with the type of neighbor tie. We discuss the implications of these findings for formulating a contextual theory of neighborhood life.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Recent theoretical arguments contend that when the state permits a religious free market, pluralism and competition will emerge and overall levels of religious participation will increase. We return to nineteenth-century America, when the emergence of a religious free market was in progress, to examine whether pluralism generated higher levels of religious participation. We use data from the New York State censuses of 1855 and 1865 to explore religious participation in 942 towns and cities in the state. Our results strongly support the pluralism thesis, highlight demographic effects on religious participation, and help explain conflicting research findings on pluralism and religious participation. or more than two centuries the fundamental feature of American religion has been growth. In 1776 only about 17 percent of Americans were affiliated with a church. By the end of the nineteenth century slightly more than half of the population belonged, and today nearly two-thirds of Americans are members of a specific, local congregation (Finke and Stark 1992).The continuing growth of religion in America, as well as the fact that it always has been the "otherworldly" denominations that do best, has long confronted the traditional sociological model of secularization with an unwelcome anomaly-one that has prompted many attempts to explain American religious "exceptionalism" (Tiryakian 1993). For, harbored within the broad theoretical framework of modernization, the secularization model has long proposed that as industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization increase, religion will recede (Hadden 1987). Thus, because the United States is among the most modern and urban of nations, by now it ought to display advanced symptoms of