Communication, Community Attachment, and Involvement

Abstract

A long tradition of social theory has emphasized the importance of communication to individuals' ties to their communities. Two major types of such ties are treated here: affective attachment and cognitive and active involvement. Data from a sample survey of 400 adult residents of Iowa are used to examine a structural equation model linking community attachment and involvement to newspaper use, local television news use, age, education, number of children in the home, localism, and population density. Among the results, we show that newspaper reading makes important contributions to both attachment and involvement, independently of the other variables in the model, while television news viewing does not. Error paths and correlations between the errors of the equations are estimated to aid future modeling work.