Another look at the NIMBY phenomenon.

The report by Piat, "The NIMBY Phenomenon: Listening to Community Residents' Concerns about Developing Housing for Deinstitutionalized People," is a very stimulating and challenging piece of qualitative research. It is not only written well, but also deals with a unique and important topic, the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") phenomenon, that many social workers need to deal with in their community practices. Using a naturalistic paradigm, the author reports interesting findings from the well-designed study based on actual cases of community opposition toward group homes in three Canadian communities. Although the NIMBY is as old and common a phenomenon as the history of most treatment and rehabilitation facilities in residential areas, the strength of this study is that it primarily focuses on community residents' viewpoints and perspectives. The study findings suggest several important implications for social work practitioners and social planners in the health care services field. The underlying tenet of this study appears to be the value issues behind community reactions, particularly of the opposition side. Social work is a helping profession with specific values. In the case of the United States, the NASW Code of Ethics (as revised, 1997) sets forth values, ethical principles, and professional standards to which all social workers aspire and by which they can be judged. The Code delineates six values as key to social work and prescribes ethical principles based on these values. Among these six, the first four seem to be particularly related to the NIMBY problem: (1) Social workers' primary goal is to help people in need and to address social problems; (2) social workers challenge social injustice; (3) social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of the person; (4) social workers recognize the central importance of human relationships. All of these values prescribe certain ethical standards that concern social workers' responsibilities to clients, in practice settings, and to broader society as well as to colleagues, as professionals, and to the profession. This study as field research properly addresses the first three constituents very well with a keen perception and balanced assessment. In this study, the research design, data gathering technique, analytical and reconstructive scheme are extremely well done. However, there seems to be a lack of clarity in the case selection process. "Maximum variation sampling" may be fine for a small qualitative study, with those five selection variables. However, one (perhaps the most important) criteria was not included or specified--timing. The author stated that "Incidents of community opposition to the group homes had occurred during a two-year period at the time of study" (p. 129), and "the group homes had been in operation between four months and one year" at the time of the study (p. 130). The NIMBY, like any other social phenomenon or movement, is time-sensitive. Many problem-focused social activities and phenomenon gradually or even suddenly retard as time passes or as momentum is lost. Thus, exactly when this study took place vis-[grave{e}]-vis the stage of each group home development would very much determine the extent and intensity of communi ty reaction to the arrival of such group homes--during the planning stage, at the beginning, within three months, six months, or a year later. At what point of development or operation the data was collected needs to be specified for each case, because that can be an important control variable. The sampling of community residents (n = 13) was based on the purposive method (names "taken from press clippings") and then the snowball method (their suggestions). This approach, although useful and popular, may highly skew the findings to the most outspoken voices in each community, let alone nonrepresentative reactions of each community. An active vocal minority, even though powerful and influential, does not necessarily reflect the true reactions of the community majority. …