Browsing by Author "Ruskomaa, Aino"

This Master’s thesis explores the sense of community in Settlement apartments’ rental houses. The aim of the study is to find out, whether there is a connection between residents’ passive and active sense of community and the socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood. By a passive sense of community, I mean the feeling of togetherness, and by active sense of community I mean the social activity and social ties between the residents. My other purpose is to explore the different forms of the sense of community existing within the houses. There are four Settlement apartments rental houses examined in this research. The houses are located in four different areas in Helsinki; Jätkäsaari, Kalasatama, Viikki and Malmi. The theoretical framework of this research is based on the discussions on spatial segregation and the growth of socioeconomic differences. Sense of community is also strongly related to social sciences, which is why I shortly present the current discussion on the sense of community ongoing in the field of social sciences. The primary research data consists of a self-made survey based on the scientific indexes of measuring the sense of community and a survey measuring the wellbeing of residents in the Helsinki metropolitan region. Statistical data of the socioeconomic structure of the research areas is provided by Statistics Finland. The methods used in this study are mostly quantitative, such as crosstabulations, descriptive statistics and Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). I have also used qualitative research methods in the analysis of the open-ended questions of the survey. The results reveal that there is no statistically significant connection between the passive sense of community and the socioeconomic structure of the area, which means that the feeling of togetherness and the sense of community is equally strong in every house researched in this study. However, there is a statistically significant difference in the active sense of community between Jätkäsaari and Viikki, and Kalasatama and Viikki. This means that the residents of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama spend more time with their neighbors than the residents of the house located in Viikki. The study also revealed that the forms of sense of community vary between the houses, which might have a connection to the residential structure of the house, and the selection of residents between different houses.