editorial
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200700015 |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Pages | 2-5 |
| Author | Felicity Callard |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
EDITORIAL
2journal of public mental health
vol 6 • issue 3
© Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd
editorial
Felicity Callard
felicity.callard@virgin.net
In October of 2006, the Financial Times published
an article entitled ‘Harvard study paints bleak
picture of ethnic diversity’ (Lloyd, 2006). It reported
a talk that Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone
(Putnam, 2000), and architect of the concept of
social capital) had given to an audience in
Manchester, focusing on the results of new data from
a study on social capital in the US. Those results
indicated, in the words of the Financial Times, ‘the
corrosive effects of ethnic diversity’: in short, that
the ‘more diverse a community is, the less likely its
inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next
door neighbour to the mayor’.
Eight months later, in June 2007, the text from
Putnam’s lecture was published in the journal
Scandinavian Political Studies (Putnam, 2007).
Engagement with Putnam’s arguments is central for
those of us involved in mental health promotion,
given the prominence of his concept of social capital
in interventions to improve communities’ mental
health. What I hope to suggest, in interrogating
Putnam’s latest research, is not that Putnam’s data
are wrong, but that we may interpret the data to
reach somewhat different conclusions from those
that Putnam himself has drawn vis-à-vis the link
between trust and a community’s ethnic diversity.
According to Putnam’s argument, his research
indicates that, in the short to medium term,
‘immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social
solidarity and inhibit social capital’ (p138). This, he
suggests, is because those living in diverse
communities are more likely to withdraw from
collective life and distrust their neighbours, no
matter who they are. In what follows, I summarise a
fair amount of material from Putnam’s paper in order
to allow us to understand how he came to draw these
conclusions.
His data were drawn from a survey conducted in
2000 with 30,000 individuals living in 41 very
different communities across the US. The majority
of those 41 sites were in metropolitan areas,
although some sites were within largely rural states.
Some respondents lived in almost entirely
homogeneous neighbourhoods, others in
extraordinarily diverse ones. The race and ethnicity
of respondents were defined according to the four
US census categories: Hispanic, non-Hispanic
white, non-Hispanic black, and Asian. Overall, the
data indicated that in areas of greater ethnic/racial
diversity respondents demonstrated:
●lower confidence in local government, local
leaders and the local news media
●lower political efficacy (confidence regarding
their own influence)
●lower frequency of voter registration (but greater
knowledge of and interest in politics, and more
participation in protest marches and social
reform groups)
● less expectation that others will cooperate to
solve collective dilemmas (eg. voluntary
conservation during a water shortage)
●less likelihood of working on a community
project
●lower likelihood of giving to charity or
volunteering
●fewer close friends and confidants
●less happiness and lower perceived quality of life
●more time spent watching television and more
agreement that television is their most
important kind of entertainment. (Putnam,
2007; pp149–150)
Putnam argued that these data throw a spanner in
the works of the two major theories that have
attempted to account for how diversity affects
individuals’ social connections. Those two theories
are the contact hypothesis and the conflict
hypothesis. According to the first, contact with
those different from oneself will break down
ignorance and fear and generate trust. (It is worth
noting that the logic of the contact hypothesis not
only underpinned racial desegregation law in the
US, but characterises a great deal of anti-stigma
interventions, including those focused around
mental health problems.) In contrast, the conflict
hypothesis postulates that diversity fosters ‘out-
group’ distrust and ‘in-group’ cohesion (the
explanations are various, though competition for
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