Community-oriented action and wellbeing: Looking back to look forward

ABSTRACT

Through the lens of interactional field theory, we examine what has been learned about community dynamics, particularly community-oriented action and its relationship with community satisfaction, quality of life, and wellbeing. We first discuss eight previously unpublished analyses of community-oriented action and wellbeing in various forms. Then, we look to new data from the Utah Wellbeing Project which provides a considerably larger set of localities that range from small rural towns to rapid growth and large cities. While greater participation in community-oriented action correlates with higher levels of wellbeing in some cases, there are nuances that suggest more attention is needed to changes over time and across different contexts. We conclude with new recommendations related to interactional field theory and the future of community-oriented action research more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• community wellbeing
• community satisfaction
• quality of life

Acknowledgements

We thank all of the respondents to the surveys covered in this paper. We are also grateful to Dr. AE. Luloff for his guidance in our early career years.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26883597.2023.2165135.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this work was provided by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, US Dept of Agriculture (Project No ILLU-875-305), the National Science Foundation, Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Program (Award #1733990), the National Science Foundation, Geography and Spatial Sciences Program, a National Science Foundation EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement (IIA-1208732), the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station (Project 3870), the US Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station (Project PNW 03-CA-11261975), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Agriculture, the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Hatch Projects 1005128 and 1005129), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA R833707), the US Forest Service, Region 2, the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station (UAES1400), the Utah League of Cities and Towns, and Utah State Extension (EXT00094).