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Advances in Community Measurement Methods Webinar 

April 17, 2019

DR. GOUGE: Good afternoon. And hello, everyone. Thank you 

so much for joining us today. My name is Dr. Melissa 

Gouge. I’m from the Office of Research and Evaluation 

at the Corporation for National& Community Service. 

Our office’s objectives are to support our agency’s 

mission by building knowledge on civic engagement, 

volunteering and national service. We conduct inhouse research, but we also fund research through 

competitive grants through researchers, scholars and 

dissertators at institutions of higher education and 

support research and evaluation of our programs and 

grantees.

Our webinar series is one way that we share our 

ongoing research and findings. Today, we are very 

excited to host another research and evidence webinar 

titled Advances in Community Measurement Methods. But 

before we begin, we’d like to cover a few 

housekeeping items for Adobe Connect. 

EMILY: Thank you everyone for joining today. We want to 

let you know this webinar will be recorded and posted 

online following the presentation. All audio will be 
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done through your computer speakers over your 

internet connection. You can ask questions at any 

time during the presentation by using the chat boxes 

below. As I mentioned earlier, this webinar is being 

recorded, and if you have any questions or experience 

technical difficulties, please let us know in the 

chat box. I believe that takes care of our 

housekeeping items.

DR. GOUGE: Thank you, Emily. Our format today is going to 

be as follows: Dr. Mary Hyde, the Director of 

Research and Evaluation will provide some 

introductory remarks. Mary is not only the director 

of Research and Evaluation; she is also a community 

psychology. Dr. Mary Ohmer will then present. She’s 

an associate professor in the Community Organization 

and Social Action concentration at the University of 

Pittsburg in the School of Social Work.

She has worked extensively as a community organizer 

and developer and community-based researcher. Her 

current research and teaching focus on community 

organization and development, and community-based 
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intervention research, fair housing, youth engagement 

and international social and community development. 

She is also one of our 2018 Community Conversation 

research grantees who’s utilizing participatory 

methods alongside her community partner, the Homewood 

Children’s Village, to tackle community-identified 

issues.

Then after Dr. Ohmer’s presentation, Gina Croft, 

acting director of NCCC will provide some closing 

remarks. She was a member of one of our first cohorts 

and has been involved with national service for many 

years promoting volunteering and strengthening 

communities. Then we will open a discussion for 

questions and answers. During the webinar, if you 

have questions, please feel free to ask them or 

provide comments in the chat box. We’ll be tracking 

those and will address those during the discussion 

session. And I’ll now pass this on to Dr. Mary Hyde. 

DR. HYDE: Thank you, Melissa. Thank you everyone for 

joining us today. We’re really excited about today’s 

topic. I just have three brief remarks to make. One, 
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April 17, 2019

is that I’m really excited about today’s topic

because of the mission of our agency, which for those 

of you who may not know it, is that we strive to 

improve lives, strengthen community and facilitate 

civic engagement through service and volunteering. 

session. 

That strengthening community piece is really 

important and central to the work of our programs in 

this agency. And because of our role inside of the 

agency, which is to sort of measure our progress 

against this mission, today’s topic is particularly 

exciting because assessing communities, measuring 

communities and measuring activities and impact 

within communities is a very challenging task, so I 

think Dr. Ohmer’s work and the work that she’s going 

to cover today is a significant resource not only to 

this agency but to everyone who is working in 

community and trying to do measurement in some way or 

another. 

So I think today’s going to be an incredibly valuable 

session and opportunity to learn about the resources 
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that are out there, and then the last remark that I 

will make because I know Dr. Ohmer has a lot to cover 

today is that this is also exciting to me because it 

takes me back to sort of where I started my research 

career, and some of the materials that are included 

in her work is exactly how I started working on my 

dissertation and reflect some of the original work I 

did in community, developing indicators with them.

My first question, which you can answer at the end of 

this session, Mary Ohmer, is where was this material 

when I was writing my dissertation? It really 

probably would have saved me about a year’s worth of 

[inaudible] review. With that, I’m going to pass it 

along to Mary and have her start. 

DR. OHMER: Oh, that is hilarious, Dr. Hyde, because I 

with I had it as well when writing my dissertation. 

That’s probably one of the reasons we decided to 

write this. I just want to thank CNCS, the Office of 

Research and Evaluation, Dr. Hyde, Dr. Gouge, Emily, 

[unintelligible] and Lauren. Thank you so much for 

giving me an opportunity to do this today and thank 
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you all those people, wow, from everywhere being 

interested in this topic, so I hope I meet your 

expectations. 

I’m very excited. The reason we wrote – this is based 

on a book that I wrote with four of the colleagues 

and I’ll tell you who they are in a minute, but, of 

our own frustration in finding measures for 

neighborhood and community research in one place and 

accessible place and having to just do so many 

literature searches and reviews and not knowing how 

to – there’s some synthesis of some of these measures 

in some articles but not across the board and really 

thinking about it strategically and having one place, 

like a go-to place where practitioners, students, 

professors, researchers, people in the field could 

actually use it.

We’re really looking at utilization. And so, unlike 

other kind of measures books that have just lists of 

measures in the items, we provide a conceptual 

framework, which I’ll go over today, some 

methodological issues that you run into when you do 
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community research, and also just in each chapter, a 

synthesis of the definitions, conceptual frameworks, 

prior research, et cetera of the measures that are in 

each chapter. 

So this webinar’s taken directly from – that’s the 

citation [inaudible] in that book. My co-authors were 

Claudia Colton, who is a distinguished professor and 

founding director of the Center on Urban Poverty and 

Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied 

Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, 

pre-eminent community research in especially social 

work, Darcy Freedman, associate professor of 

Population and Quantitative Health Sciences also at 

Case Western.

Joann Sobeck, Associate Dean for Research and 

director for the Center for Social Work Research at 

Wayne State University School of Social Work, and my 

colleague here, Jaime Booth [phonetic], who is a 

professor here in the school. We tried to make this 

as interdisciplinary in terms of the measures we 

include as possible. All of us in this field, I think 
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you can agree, you have to be interdisciplinary. You 

have to look across disciplines. The measures in this 

book cross disciplines. 

I’m gonna start out by talking about how we define 

place. We had to distinguish that our book was about 

community, but also about place. We’re going to talk 

about that, we’re going to talk today in the 

objectives about a framework for understanding these 

dimensions. Challenges we face in community research. 

I’m going to talk a little bit about the measures 

themselves, what our inclusion criteria were, and 

also go through those with you, and give you one case 

study on the slide, and I have a handout with other 

case studies to think about how we apply this

information, and how might you apply.

What did you learn? What thoughts do you have? What 

are some of the challenges you still face in doing 

this work? We’re talking about places here. And 

places matter, even though all of us use social media 

to connect and have relationships, or to community, 

email, or twitter, Instagram, places still matter. We 
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have strong associations with place. We care about 

our place. They motivate us to act. They motivate us 

to do something. They influence the quality of our 

lives. They influence everything we do.

They still really matter. We need to be focusing on 

this in our work. These measures really help us to

understand the effects of community on this, how 

people perceive communities, and there’s not always 

clear definitions of what we mean by a specific 

community or neighborhood, but they do have very 

specific meanings for people, whether those be 

social, psychological, et cetera. They can be agents 

of change, targets of change in our work are the 

context within change happens.

And Samson, who was a sociologist, conceptualizes 

“neighborhood in theoretical terms as a geographic 

and, hence, ecological section of a larger community 

or region that usually contains residents or 

institutions and that has socially distinctive 

characteristics”. Building off of the ecological 

framework, we need to be thinking about all the 
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different ways we define community and all the 

different components of community.

Let’s go to our lovely little diagram. The co-authors 

and myself, as we were writing the book, and we had 

draft chapters, we knew we had to have some context 

and a framework to give people to use this so we all 

got together in Cleveland in the winter, it wasn’t 

snowing thank god, but we went to Cleveland, I’m in 

Pittsburgh, we had someone come from Detroit. Anyway 

we got together, we sat down all day talking about 

what’s our framework, what are the methodological 

issues, what are the things we need to be considering 

and how did these concepts we’re actually having 

measures for hang together? 

That’s our pretty little model. And it really is 

probably reflective of so many other models that 

people are using and looking at. We borrowed, 

obviously, from the conceptualizations people had of 

community to actually come up with our model. These 

are the different components I’m going to go through. 

We have ecological settings that we work in, we have 
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domains that are impacted or impact community, and 

then we also think that synergistic relationships of 

these ecological settings and domains, there’s also 

emergent properties that happen.

The ecological settings: social workers use the 

ecological systems theory and ecological framework a 

lot. There are multiple, multiple levels at the 

ecological settings. Individual, in our book we look 

at measures of people’s relationships to or 

perception of their place, their neighborhood and 

their community. This could be their attitudes about 

their place, their cognitions, their believes, 

skills, behaviors, et cetera. 

Some examples of those things we might measure

psychological empowerment, leadership efficacy, civic 

engagement, which is really at the heart of CNCS, at 

the heart of your work. Those are things that measure 

individual level attributes. We also know that 

there’s the collective, the community organizations, 

the institutions that we’re trying to strengthen, 

this is the collective level. We can use these 
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April 17, 2019

measures to evaluate the actions or the processes of 

collective and collaborative partnerships.

Collective action, how coalitions function, how 

representative they are, how well they include people 

in decision making. Those things are crucial to our 

work. And then community settings measures the social 

units of the community, neighborhood or place as a 

whole. It’s community level, we’re trying to impact 

the community level indicators like collective 

efficacy, resources, the built environment. These are 

measures that help people think about how to measure 

those community level indicators. 

And then societal measures of the community or place 

in relationship to the external region of which the 

community is a part. We know the external region; we 

know the external factors impact communities. This 

looks at targeting those factors that extra support, 

or that may actually hinder the performance, the 

capacity, the strengthening of our communities and 

neighborhoods so we know access to jobs or 

transportation is important. And quality, measures of 
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segregation, access to resources, et cetera, are 

really crucial in this framework. 

Those are the ecological settings. I want you to 

think about your own research. All of us probably 

work at different settings. Do we look at 

individuals, collective, community, societal 

settings? How do we do that? Do we use qualitative 

methods to do that, do we use quantitative methods to 

do that, do we use a combination of both? But 

thinking about situating your own research is really 

important and it can help you determine as a first 

step which measurement methods are the most 

appropriate for your research. 

I think that could be a tool that could help you 

think about where do you start in deciding 

measurement methods. Our model also has a series of 

domains and a lot of the measures are very much 

related to these domains. Individual engagement in 

communities as efficacy, the purpose is obviously to 

bolster personal empowerment and skills and to shift 

power and influence from formal or traditional 
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sources to citizens or residents, again, at the heart 

of what CNCS is trying to do. 

This includes individual levels of participation, 

patient perceptions of that process, of that 

community, behaviors related to engagement in one’s 

neighborhood or community. There’s also the idea of 

working together to solve problems, and that’s 

collective engagement. And there’s a series of things 

that can happen, obviously, to an organization to 

strengthen it at a collective level. Looking at the 

perceptions and behaviors related to the processes 

and outcomes of engagement in a community or 

neighborhood is also important.

We also think about what’s in our community, the 

resources, the amenities. This is a strength-based 

perspective, looking at the amenities, looking at the 

assets and the opportunities for change. This 

[inaudible] leads to more precise community-level 

interventions if we can already identify what’s 

actually strong in the community, what are the assets 

and target those assets for change. Perceptions and 
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objective measures of community and neighborhood 

resources, public amenities, services, et cetera. 

We know community economics also matters. This looks 

at encouraging youth economic tools to analyze the 

elements of communities that impact residents’ 

ability to access things that they care about, things 

that make their lives better like housing, 

employment, financing. We need to understand the 

economic disparities in communities and we need to 

understand the access to jobs, resources, how strong 

the housing market is. There’s measures that relate 

to community economics and really community 

development that we include.

Safety and security is one of the central concerns in 

neighborhoods that I’ve worked in, and I’m sure many 

of you have worked in. This looks at the intersection 

of individual collective community and social context 

as targets for change and intervention. All those 

ecological settings. And the perceptions and 

objective indicators of crime, of violence, but also 

residents’ perceptions of crime and fear in their 
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neighborhoods. And then the built-in natural 

environment has become so crucial to healthy living 

that we also have measures of the human-made or 

natural surroundings in a community setting that 

impact people.

Physical capital of neighborhoods, quality of 

housing, healthy food, walkability, those kinds of 

resources related to health in environment. Then 

finally we talk about community inclusivity as almost 

a meta-concept in a sense, but really thinking about 

equality of access. Equity is such an important 

issue, especially for vulnerable communities. Looking 

at equality of access, and treatment and opportunity, 

the distribution, the geo-spatial distribution of the 

population, of resources across communities and the 

impact of social exclusion and segregation and 

unequal access to resources as well as gentrification 

and diversity. Those are huge. 

We tried to be as comprehensive as we could in the 

domains of community measurements. Next I’ll discuss 

the emergent properties. These are things that we 
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think have impact and effect and are related to all 

the settings, but also all of the domains. And these 

domains that I just described are deeply embedded in 

these complex social structures of community and 

well-being, culture and power. When these domains are 

studied together, these properties emerge that stem 

from an interaction between these components and the 

environment.

When the community is the focus of the research, new 

structures, and patterns and properties, including 

overall community well-being, culture, power, etc. 

are likely to appear. These structures influence the 

domain and also give us a multilevel understanding of 

the interaction and linkages among and between the 

various domains. For example, the [inaudible] Sector 

Action of Power emerges out of a complex interaction 

between collective engagement and community safety 

and security, which is supplemented by action and 

when bolstering a greater sense of engagement. 

How do we define these? Community well-being is an 

overarching concept and goal that many community 
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activists and researchers seek to achieve and measure 

in their work. It’s often used interchangeably with 

concepts such as community satisfaction, quality of 

life, even there’s measures of happiness. We didn’t 

include those, but there’s global measures of 

happiness that I’ve seen, especially in international 

research. Research studies ask, “Is the community 

thriving? Are residents satisfied with their 

neighbors, amenities and networks for leading a 

[inaudible] life?”

We all find that culture is really important, and 

this is a characteristic of societies, communities 

and organization. The traditional, anthropological 

concept of culture is defined as shared values, 

assumptions, beliefs, rules, customs. These things 

are weaved within things like collective efficacy and 

norms and values that people share influence their 

ability to intervene. We also know that national 

organizations and foundations have realized the 

importance of culture, for example, the Robert Wood 

Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health.
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Power is also really important. We know that our work 

often is looking at power and how to grow power, how 

to tap into power, how to change power. A concept it 

can facilitate or inhibit community development and 

sustainability, often understated, and is often not 

really taken into account. It’s really an important –

on the positive side, [inaudible] power can aid in 

the ability of individuals and communities to achieve 

goals, evidence through a sense of mastery or control 

over their circumstances.

On the negative side, we know power may be used to 

inflict harm or maintain inequity. That’s the model. 

And we hope that helps people think about framing 

their work and not just a jump to measures, but to 

think about, “Where am I? Where is my research? Where 

is the community that I’m engaging in this? What are 

the most important concepts that I need to have to 

understand better before diving into doing my survey 

or my measure?” The other thing is there’s a lot of 

methodological issues.
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And this is where Claudia Colton was amazingly 

helpful in understanding these methodological 

considerations, which she has dealt with throughout 

her career. Some of these are how do we actually 

define the community or neighborhood as a unit of 

measurement? I’m gonna talk to you about three 

different ways: administrative boundaries, residents’ 

perceptions and geospatial boundaries. There’s 

others, but I’m gonna highlight those. Do we use 

subjective or objective measures?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of those? And 

really central to, again, CNCS is how do we engage 

with the community in what we’re doing in measure 

selection and maybe developing and evaluating the 

measures. Let’s talk about administrative boundaries. 

I’m sure some of you use this. A lot of the studies 

use units for proxies for neighborhoods or placebased communities such as census data or tracks. They 

weren’t established for us to do the kind of research 

we’re doing but we use them because they are 

accessible and basically can really answer some of 

our questions, however they don’t always coincide 
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with the individual or resident’s experience with 

regard to their neighborhoods.

And they may be re-drawn, they also vary in terms of 

size, they don’t always fit residents’ definition. 

What we also need to be considering then is the 

degree to which these administrative boundaries 

really do fit the research and the conceptualization 

of the neighborhood and community. Again most of 

these were not decided for some of the analysis. And 

we use them but we have to just acknowledge that if 

we do. Also there’s a thing called resident-perceived 

neighborhoods.

This is when you’re actually working with the 

community and asking them, “How do you define your 

neighborhood? Where are the boundaries? What’s 

relevant to you in your everyday life?” They can be 

used to craft the neighborhood boundaries for your 

study. There’s even such a thing as in individual 

thing looking outside their home and saying, “This is 

my boundary for what I call a neighborhood.” It’s a 
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close-knit neighborhood around where you live, the 

spoke neighborhood. Those also are really important.

There’s also evidence that the magnitude of the 

conceptual effects of some health outcomes is greater 

when we consider some of these more specific measures 

of neighborhoods including geospatial boundaries. 

These are defined by spatial bumpers or physical 

features. You can use geographic information system 

tools to draw the individualized neighborhood 

boundaries, center on a person’s location, like we 

just talked about. And then there’s something called 

ego-centered or sliding neighborhoods. These are 

buffers of varying sizes that can be drawn around 

each house’s location and neighborhood measures are 

calculated to be buffers.

The buffer may be specified by distance, population 

size, geographic features. The good thing about this 

is when you’re doing comparative work in 

neighborhoods, a whole neighborhood, if you want to 

do statistical analysis on effects, how many more –

it’s hard to find enough cases to do the analysis, 
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but if you do these smaller buffers or zones you can 

actually get enough cases in the neighborhood you’re 

working in and have a comparison neighborhood with 

the same kind of buffers and do comparison analysis. 

It allows for that.

Another thing is do we use objective measures? Do we 

use subjective measures? Objective measures, again, 

are things like administrative data, systematic 

social observation. And subjective measures are often 

derived from survey items that assess individuals’ 

perceptions of their neighborhood, or qualitative 

data. There are strengths and weaknesses of both. And 

there’s been a move in our field to favor objective 

measures, but we have to really think about what’s 

the census come from, actually surveys. It is 

obviously more cases, more people, but they’re also 

surveys and we need to think about how we approach 

this.

We need to think about when deciding whether to use 

an objective or subjective measure of relevant 

attributes in a neighborhood, we have to be clear 
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what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to 

understand. And so have our research question and 

goals frame the use of subjective and objective 

measures, and not necessarily what’s considered 

favorable at the time. It’s really important to do 

that. And practical matters, obviously, make a big 

difference because we only have so much time.

It might be good to have an administrative indicator. 

Your funding, your expertise, etc. I think that you 

need to think about when time and resource 

limitations dictate the decisions to use objective 

and subjective neighborhood-level measurement. It’s 

important that you restrict your inferences to the 

type of measure employed. For example, perceptions of 

disorder cannot be used to infer crime rates unless 

prior research has shown that these measures are 

measuring the same construct. You have to almost have 

some administrative data on crime rates and then 

perception of crime, disorder and fear, potentially, 

and use all of that data to understand what’s going 

on in the community around crime and violence.
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Again, my point is when possible to use both 

objective and subjective measures and have them 

tailored to your research goals and questions. Then 

the other thing we need to think about is how do we 

engage community partners in our work. We have a long 

history, social scientists, of conducting research on 

the community without getting their perspective or 

evaluating the usefulness of the findings to their 

everyday lives. The same thing has to do with 

measurement. We don’t want people to feel like 

they’re the objects or research who have been engaged 

in research.

Community-driven research is being advanced by CNCS 

and other institutions. Often it’s called CBPR, or 

community-based participatory research, which is a 

collaborative partnership to research that equitably 

involves community members in all aspects. This, we 

believe, should include measurement selection. In 

order to do that there are two kind of 

considerations. How a researcher and community 

practitioners communicates measurement issues and 

builds a community partner’s capacity to participate.
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And then the necessary steps to modify or develop 

measures to fit the context without compromising 

validity and reliability. A really, really important 

thing. This is a good example. In this example, 

community members participated in focus groups where 

they were asked about youth violence in their 

community. These focus groups were coded, and the 

input of the community advisors, 43 indicators were 

identified, the community and academic team went back 

to a bank of validated measures they had used in a 

previous round of data collection and match those 

with the focus group [inaudible] information.

And then 17 of those rose to the top as measures that 

crossed over. And they’ve used that data to evaluate 

psychometric properties of the new scale that were 

developed based on the community’s definition of the 

factors that were crucial to [inaudible] youth 

violence. The results were psychometric tests that 

were then discussed with a community advisory board 

and further refined as were made. My own project here 

in Pittsburg that’s funded by CNCS, we have a 
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community advisory board and we’re training them in 

all of the community-based research principles, 

methods, etc. 

We developed a logical model with them. We are 

looking now at the measures and so we’ve gone over 

the validated measures, many from the book that I 

just wrote, to say these are the validated measures, 

here’s what we’re saying in the logic model that 

we’re trying to achieve as outcomes. Do these make 

sense to you? You guys take the survey, let’s talk 

through these measures. And then we’re obviously 

looking at now that feedback. How do we actually use 

that feedback? We may not have to change any.

But if we do, then we have to have a process to 

validate this to test the reliability, validity, etc. 

I’m gonna now talk about in review the measures. We 

had to have some inclusion criteria for measures we 

wanted to [inaudible]. And so we wanted to use 

measures that had instruments, items, methods, etc. 

that were more widely used that were distinct, 

published or manualized, fully documented so people 
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could access the articles, information, reach the 

researchers we have in the table of contact 

information for all the primary authors, etc., 

websites where applicable.

We wanted you to be able to replicate them and 

understand them. We want people in the field and 

researchers to use them. Clearly we wanted to have 

the best measures, the most reliable, valid, some 

research behind them, and so we looked at that, and 

also in English, published in English. The majority 

were examined and tested in the U.S. We also have 

measures for other countries if they are actually 

widely used and they’re also in English. We did not 

include all the international measures that are being 

used in a lot of the fields that are in other 

languages, etc.

I also have as a handout I gave you a list of 

measures and tables that are in the book, and so 

these coincide with those. The community and 

neighborhood measures include two sets of measures, 

the capacity for community change and the ability of 
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community to engage in collective action and 

collaborative effort. Chapter four talks about 

community readiness and capacity for change. There 

are ten measures in there, there’s readiness for 

change measures, there’s capacity of community-based 

health and social initiatives, there’s community 

organizational capacity measures and community 

ownership and preparedness.

And then chapter five talks about strategic 

collective action in communities. And this is the 

collective looking at collective efforts, the 

contexts affecting organizing, power and influence in 

CBPR, measures examining activities, functioning and 

characteristics of coalitions and partnerships. And 

there’s 11 measures in that chapter. Then we’ve got 

measures that assess the nature of social processes. 

We know how important social processes and engagement 

are in communities, often understudied before, often 

very hard to measure before, but people have come a 

long way in that.
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Social connections, empowerment, efficacy. Chapter 

six is about social connection and the processes in 

communities, social processes like the types of 

connections among residents, the relationships among 

residents in their neighborhood or place, sense of 

community, social capital, social cohesion ties, 

collective efficacy. When I get organizing, I always 

thought, “I think we’re doing this.” It’s called 

social capital now, I think. We’re building strong 

relationships, we’re building bonds, but I didn’t 

have any idea how to measure it until I actually 

understood the research later when I went back to 

school.

Making this available to people like who I was in the 

field could be really important to them now so they 

can measure the effects of their work. We always said 

we’d build community’s empowerment or engagement. Now 

we can measure that. Psychological empowerment among 

youth, adults, community empowerment, civic 

engagement, community participation, activism, 

leadership in political efficacy and engagement among 

both youth and adults, and that’s in chapter seven.
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We all care about what the characteristics are in our 

community. And we are looking at four different 

things. In chapter eight we have measures of 

community resources and resident satisfaction with 

those. A lot of these are observation-based measures, 

but some are survey-based. This is using both 

objective and subjective measures of community 

resources, amenities, environmental indicators, 

awareness of [inaudible] with satisfaction, 

perception of the quality of the neighborhoods, etc. 

And back to the built environment, the neighborhood 

food environment related to nutrition, food access, 

cost and quality, walkability, pedestrian/cycling 

assessments and the walkability of the neighborhood.

All these things have to do with encouraging people 

to be healthy. We need to know if the environment 

supports that. These measurements look at that, green 

space, recreation, all of that. And these are often 

things that are missing in vulnerable communities. 

Housing and neighborhood change. Our project with 

CNCS is focused on neighborhood change and equitable 
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development. There’s a measure in this chapter using 

Google Street view to look at neighborhood change. So 

we’re going to train our [inaudible] and our 

community participates, our youth and adult 

participants in how to do that, how to use that 

Google Street view measure to look at neighborhood 

change.

Housing quality, affordability, vacancy, blight, 

mobility we know effects neighborhoods, people coming 

in and out of neighborhoods. That’s all Claudia 

Colton, she did a great job with that. She’s been 

doing that for years. And Darcy Freedman did a lot of 

the built environment because she’s a health policy 

person. Community disorder, crime and violence. This 

is looking at both the observational and survey 

measures of physical and social disorder, looking at 

systematic social observations. That is a process of 

how you collect the data that was developed by a 

sociologist.

For measures of fear of crime and exposure to 

violence, and then methods and data for how you 
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gather indicators of crime and violence in 

communities. That is really important. We also have 

measures that examine the overall quality and 

character of place-based communities. These are 

measures of place-based exclusions and unequal access 

to resources, racial and economic segregation, 

looking at negative environmental exposures and 

access to transportation, and jobs and services. And 

then our meta, global concept of community well-being 

and quality of life, there are some composite 

indicators, both domestic and international, looking 

at residents’ perceptions of individual community 

well-being and then some that use, again, 

administrative data such as human development 

indicators, quality of life and livability.

I want you guys to think about this. This is one 

scenario and there’s a handout with three other ones. 

We’re working in a collaborative team and our goal is 

to prevent community and youth violence. There’s a 

lot of research that shows that social connections 

and cohesion, otherwise known as collective efficacy, 

shared norms and values, and resident engagement in 
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addressing neighborhood problems actually leads to 

lower levels of community violence. This is 

neighborhood collective efficacy. You’re part of a 

team of social work and other researchers and 

neighborhood and youth serving agencies, local police 

department, while working together to reduce 

community violence using innovative approaches.

The team is interested in assessing neighborhood 

levels of collective efficacy and their impact on 

indicators of community and youth violence, and 

developing strategies to increase collective efficacy 

in targeted neighborhoods. What’s the geographical

unit of analysis? What’s your ecological setting? 

What do you think? Is it individual, collective, 

community, societal? Is it a combination of both? It 

depends on your research question. I would actually 

look at individual and community level indicators in 

this. Look at the individual’s perception, how safe 

they feel, their perception of crime and disorder, 

the community levels of collective efficacy and the 

community levels of crime and violence.
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We’re reviewing the measures we discussed earlier, 

what would you do? What measures would you use? Why 

would you use those? How would you go about sampling 

people to be in your study or how would you collect 

that data? Would you try to do bespoke neighborhoods? 

Would you try to do buffers if you’re gonna do 

[inaudible] design. One of the strategies could be 

recruiting participants to be engaged that represent 

different sections of the neighborhood so you 

actually have a representative sample to understand 

crime and violence across the neighborhood. 

What are the strengths and limitations of the 

measures? And what’s the extent of community 

participation and engagement in your study and how 

would you facilitate this engagement? Those are all 

really important things to think about and to answer 

as you begin to design your study and then also 

select your measures. What would you need to consider 

when selecting your measures? What levels of 

measurement? What ecological settings? What domains? 

What methodological issues or considerations? What 

else might you consider?
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There are other resources for community and 

neighborhood measurement that are out there that are 

helpful. The National Neighborhood Indicators project 

is one. NeighborWorks America, they do community 

development, they have success measures, and the CDC 

and other kinds of health institutes also have 

compendiums of measures. I’m sure there’s more than 

this. These are just a few examples. Again, the 

purpose of our book was the really promote the use of 

reliable and valid measures for community and 

neighborhood research including people who are doing 

program evaluation, community-based participatory 

research, community-level intervention research, 

people just looking at neighborhood effects.

It runs the gamut. And we believe it can be used by 

multiple disciplines, people across social work, 

sociology, urban and community development, public 

health, community psychology, sociology practitioners 

in the field, health practitioners in the field, nonprofits, community grassroots organizations, 

community neighborhood organizations. We think it 
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also can be used to train students as well as staff 

from community agencies, to promote services, 

programs and interventions that benefit community 

residents and institutions.

From neighborhood organizations, community 

development corporations, foundations, city planning, 

health departments, etc. I just want to end with 

thinking about: what was the most important thing you 

learned today and how will you use this information? 

How do you apply this information? What is important 

to you in your research? And was this helpful, 

hopefully? I just want to again thank you guys, all 

153 of you. Thank you so much. I’m just really 

looking forward to looking at all the chat. And 

Melissa is going to actually lead us in some Q&A for 

the rest of the time.

DR. GOUGE: Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Ohmer. We’ve 

got some very active discussions going on in the chat 

box already so I think our Q&A session’s going to be 

great. Before we open the line for questions and 
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answers, Gina Croft, the acting director of our NCCC 

program will give us a few closing remarks.

GINA: Thank you so much. And thank you Dr. Ohmer for 

the presentation, but more importantly, thank you for 

being a part of the technical panel for the work that 

we’re going that’s gonna move us to the next level. 

AmeriCorps and NCCC is a national service program for 

18-24-year-olds. It’s residential and team-based. We 

have about 26 years’ worth of data because we’ve 

documented every tree we’ve planted, we’ve counted 

every sandbag we’ve laid down, and many, many other 

things we’ve been counting, [inaudible], pounds of 

debris removed, all kinds of things.

And the impact of the program, anecdotally, we feel 

we have a lot of success and the ability to describe 

that success. But the mission of NCCC is challenging 

because we don’t know the value of the weight between 

us. We have two competing priorities. One is to 

develop our members who serve with us for ten months 

into future leaders and the competing part of it is 
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the impact to the community and what we’re actually 

doing and how well we’re doing it. 

Discussions like this, grant activities like this 

that is furthering the ability to one, give us more 

information to look at ourselves differently and ask 

ourselves the right kinds of questions with the right 

kind of framework that actually will help us one, 

define better what our community impact is and help 

us solve some problems with a mission that’s pretty 

complicated like ours with competing priorities of 

where do we invest more, how do we make changes, what 

can we do to move our program’s impact to the next 

level so that we are demonstrating through important 

pieces of evidence, and not just very basic counts, 

that validates where we’re investing our time, energy 

and efforts.

I’ve challenged folks who work with me to make sure 

that we’re doing a few very simple things, that we’re 

recruiting the right kinds of people and helping to 

retain them, that we have the most relevant project 

base across the country to meet our nation’s most 
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critical needs so that we can build champions in and 

around the work we do. And those three things 

hopefully lead us to having the best business case 

for running a residential program like NCCC. Having 

this information and framework and all of the work 

that guides us that we heard today using these kinds 

of opportunities to help move our work forward has 

been extraordinarily valuable.

We’re into it a year and a half, maybe I’m stretching 

the timeline a little bit, but we have a very long 

way to go, and this important work that you do, Dr. 

Ohmer, and that our colleagues can use to help us 

move the ball forward, not just in how me as the 

national director can use important data, and 

information and evidence to inform my decisions, but 

how do we then represent out work and the impact of 

our service opportunities and experience to the 

country at large to taxpayers that are interested on 

the ROI on what we’re investing in programs like the 

one I oversee.
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It’s a great appreciation that we have really great 

minds to put these things together and move up 

forwards. Thank you so much for being a part of this 

process, and I’m looking forward to all that is 

unlocked with the keys that will help move us forward 

in this direction. Thanks to Mary and all of your 

team here at CNCS, but more importantly for finding 

the right kinds of resources that build us the 

infrastructure to move forward so that we’re 

demonstrating the best we can on behalf of one, being 

good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars, but also 

doing the right thing through our national service 

opportunities. Thanks. This is exciting.

MARY: That’s just a huge motivator for me for why I 

wanted to do this, is to show impact so that 

additional resources and support go into the 

communities [inaudible] to build those strong 

communities, to show the return, “Hey, there is an 

impact”, how to measure that, how to demonstrate that 

and how to show how valuable is the work that you 

guys do and the work that I’m sure all of you guys 

listening today do, and to get additional resources 
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into these communities and to change to build 

stronger and healthy sustainable communities.

FEMALE: Thank you. Thank you to Dr. Mary Ohmer, Dr. 

Mary Hyde and Gina Croft for such a wonderful, 

dynamic presentation. And we have a few minutes left 

to answer some questions. We have a couple of 

questions that have already come in and for example, 

how about we’ve got a question from Kristina Kobe 

[phonetic]: it doesn’t happen often that both 

objective and subjective measures are used in these 

sort of data collection enterprises.

MARY: Does it happen often? I don’t know. I think we’re 

getting better at that. I know when I started doing 

some of this research it wasn’t the case, but I think 

we need to move in that direction because even that 

case in an area I told you about community violence 

where I’d done some work. I had a little pilot study 

that gathered survey data from the participants that 

we trained in collective efficacy. I want to take it 

to the next stage of now we need to actually look at 

the data. We need to get administrative data, we need 
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objective data, we need to combine that with survey 

data. That tells a better story. That gives us more 

information to understand if we’re having an impact. 

FEMALE: Thank you. Mary, can you review a slidingscale comparative analysis of neighborhoods, and 

would it compose neighborhood boundaries that 

individual youth patterns compared to 

demographically-matched individuals in another 

neighborhood?

MARY: Yeah. I think you definitely need to be able to do 

that. You could. Claudia’s the expert in this, but 

there are definitely ways to be able to comparative 

analysis and create those bumpers or boundaries, or 

bespoke neighborhoods, that actually you could 

replicate in a neighborhood you weren’t doing an 

intervention in, and at least get administrative data 

from that or even do a survey. Do a stratified sample 

based on that stratification of using those buffers.

FEMALE: We’ll take one more question from the chat box

and one from the room here. Faced with limited 
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resources, which would be your top measures to deploy 

in a community study. This comes from John 

Mollenkopf.

DR. OHMER: I’m going to back to the administrative data 

because that’s not very expensive to access and to 

you, to start there, to maybe create a baseline to 

make an argument for further resources to do more onthe-ground data collection with people in a 

community. I would say, again, to make a case to get 

additional resources to do additional, more in-depth 

measurement, that might be a good place to start. And 

there are so many different tools you can use to do 

that, census data. In the book we have a lot of 

different ways to gather data that’s objective to 

make a case for whatever you’re trying to do.

FEMALE: That’s a great idea that the limited resources 

consideration, you might begin to do some research 

using those methods that might allow you to build and 

to use other methods. Thank you. Do you have any 

specific examples of valid measures for neighborhood 

characteristics that you’ve seen and perhaps and data 
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that’s been collected in an accessible way for 

multiple audiences?

DR. OHMER: Some of the measures in our book actually if 

you look at the chapter on the community resources, 

community resources and resident satisfaction, and 

also the built environment influencing healthy 

living, there are some reliable and validated 

measures in there of different neighborhood 

indicators and characteristics depending on what the 

goal of your study is. Also if you look at the 

neighborhood change there’s some validated measures 

using administrative data in there, as well there’s 

some survey measures in those chapters also.

I would say those are pretty helpful. And you can 

assess and look at them and assess whether they fit 

your research questions clearly, but we tried to 

include things that had some research behind it or 

some validity and reliability.

FEMALE: Thank you. Thanks for directing us to exactly 

where we could find that answer in your book. We 
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didn’t have a lot of time for Q&A but we are getting 

close to 3:00 and we’d like to be respectful of 

everyone’s time. Mary or Gina, do you have anything 

you’d like to add before we close?

DR. OHMER: I just appreciate everyone’s time today. And 

I’m gonna go through your chat, but feel free to 

contact me or any of my co-authors. They all know 

about this today. If you have questions, I think 

somebody put Claudia’s website up there. Please, I’d 

be happy to answer any questions you have and follow

up to this webinar.

FEMALE: Wonderful, Mary. Thank you for offering your 

contact information. Thank you again so much to all 

of our speakers and our audience today. This has been 

a wonderful discussion. We’d like to thank Emily, 

Ramus [phonetic] and Connor Berkner [phonetic] for 

ICF International and their colleagues for all of 

their technical support that helps make this magic 

happen. And we’ll be sending all of the folks who 

attended a post-webinar survey so please let us know 

your thoughts on the webinar and ideas for future 
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webinars. We would love to hear what you have to say. 

We will be posting this recording within about a 

month on our website. If you would like any more 

information, you can find us there. Thank you so much 

for attending today. 

FEMALE: 

DR. OHMER:

FEMALE: 

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