Helping and Receiving Help From Neighbours: A Look at Canadian and Foreign-Born
Neighbours are important agents of civic integration for both Canadian and foreign-born. For immigrants, greater participation in help exchanges with neighbours is desirable in ensuring social cohesion, the creation of social capital as well in terms of enhancing mutual trust, reciprocity and solidarity between community members. A recent report produced by Fernando Mata used a pooled sample of approximately thirty-eight thousand Canadian adults drawn from Statistics Canada’s General Social Surveys (GSS) of 2010 and 2012 to look at the participation in help exchanges between immigrants and their neighbours.
Findings suggest that bidirectional help exchanges were the most prevalent pattern of behaviour among both Canadian and foreign-born individuals. Multivariate analyses using multiple correspondence analysis and multinomial logistic regressions revealed that higher rates of bidirectional exchanges of help were typical among the Canadian-born when compared to foreign-born groups. This research also concluded that immigrant status and length of residence are as important as other socio-demographic and attitudinal correlates in influencing help exchange behaviour, and that favourable views of a neighbourhood increase the occurrence of bidirectional help exchanges. This research also hints that there may be different cultures of “civic engagement” in Canada where neighbours may play more or less peripheral roles as agents of civic integration.
