If Collectivists like Social Groups, and Cities are Social Groups, do Collectivists like Cities?

Do you like the place where you live? Maybe it's got great architecture, it's clean and crime free, the housing is cheap, and/or the nightlife is good? But maybe your liking for the place is also related to something else - your own tendency to identify with social groups? In some recent research, my colleagues and I investigated this issue by considering the relations between collectivism, city identification, and city evaluation.

Collectivism is a sociocultural orientation towards perceiving the self and others as belonging to social groups, and it influences the extent to which people identify with social groups. The more collectivist you are, the more strongly you identify with social groups.  Prior research has found that people who identify strongly with a place tend to like that place more. Hence, it is possible that people who are relatively high in collectivism identify strongly with the place that they live and, consequently, evaluate that place more positively.

To investigate this possibility, my colleagues and I sampled 1,660 residents of four cities in three countries: Newcastle, Australia; Sydney, Australia; Paris, France; and Istanbul, Turkey. Participants completed an online survey containing measures of collectivism, city identification, and city evaluation. We found that, within each city sample and across the combined samples, a specific measure of collectivism called collective interdependent self-construal was positively related to city evaluation. We also found that city identification mediated this relation. Hence, people's general tendency to construe social groups as part of their self (collectivism; e.g., “The groups I belong to are an important reflection of who I am”) predicted their level of identification with their city (city identification; e.g., "I identify with other people living in Sydney"), which in turn helped to explain their positive appraisal of that city (city evaluation).

A key limitation of our research is that it employed a cross-sectional correlational design, which prevented us from drawing clear conclusions about the causal direction of the relations that we observed. Future research should employ a longitudinal research design in order to provide clearer conclusions on this issue.

The present research results imply that the social psychological group processes that are responsible for people's identification with and evaluation of social groups based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc. may also apply to cities because, at their base, cities are social groups.

For further information please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., Badea, C., Condie, J., Mahfud, Y., Morrison, T., & Peker, M. (2017). Individual differences in collectivism predict city identification and city evaluation in Australian, French, and Turkish cities Journal of Environmental Psychology, 50, 9-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.01.007

For a self-archived version, please click here.  

“It Wasn’t My Idea to Come Here”: Young Women Lack Ownership of the Idea to Immigrate

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Together with getting married and buying a house, the decision to immigrate is one of the most important decisions that a person can make.  So, it’s important that immigrants feel that they have satisfactory input into the process of deciding whether or not to migrate.  In some recent research, I looked at a very early stage of this decision-making process: ownership of the idea to immigrate.

I analysed survey data from 1,702 married immigrants to Australia. Each immigrant was asked “whose idea was it to emigrate to Australia?” Responses were coded as indicating either sole ownership (“It was my idea”), joint ownership with spouse or partner (“We thought of the idea together”), or no ownership (“It was my husband or wife’s idea”).

Surprisingly, I found gender, age, and cross-cultural differences on this very simple, early-stage measure of decision-making. Women were significantly less likely than men to claim ownership of the idea to immigrate, and this lack of ownership went on to predict women’s lack of satisfaction following their move to Australia.

In addition, young women and nonWestern women were less likely than older women and Western women to claim ownership of the idea to immigrate. This pattern of results may reflect a lack of power experienced by young and nonWestern women in their marriages.

The present findings do not imply that young or female immigrants were in any way forced or coerced to migrate to Australia.  However, they do provide some cause for concern, especially given that ownership of the idea to immigrate appears to predict subsequent satisfaction in the new country.

This research has been officially accepted for publication in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, which is a top quality journal, ranked in the top third of sociology journals. For further information, please see the following article: 

Rubin, M. (2013). “It wasn’t my idea to come here!”: Ownership of the idea to immigrate as a function of gender, age, and culture International Journal of Intercultural Relations DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2013.02.001

Note: The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Australian Government's Department of Immigration and Citizenship.