Social Inequality, Institutional Participation, and Perceived Community Resilience: A Cross-Community Analysis
Keywords:
social inequality; institutional participation; perceived influence; community resilience; procedural equity; intermediary organisationsAbstract
Institutional participation is not exhausted by attendance: residents may participate frequently without believing that institutions take their concerns seriously or allow them to influence decisions. This study examines the associations among a community-level inequality-and-disadvantage composite, two dimensions of institutional participation, and perceived community resilience in twelve communities. The resident survey contained 1,847 observations (mean age 43.2 years, SD = 14.6; 52.4% female). Participation was assessed through engagement frequency and perceived influence, while perceived resilience covered collective efficacy, social cohesion, and adaptive capacity. At the resident level, participation frequency correlated with perceived resilience at r = .54, perceived influence correlated with perceived resilience at r = .61, and the two participation dimensions correlated at r = .61. Contextual coefficients previously obtained from a pooled structural specification were negative for inequality–participation (β = −.36) and inequality–resilience after accounting for participation (β = −.22), and positive for participation–resilience (β = .48) and the inequality-by-intermediary-organisation term (β = .28). Because inequality and intermediary-organisational presence vary at the community level and only twelve communities contribute contextual information, these coefficients are reported as exploratory standardized associations rather than population-level inferential effects; no cluster-level significance claims, causal mediation claims, or simple-slope claims are made. The strongest descriptive pattern is that perceived influence is more closely associated with perceived resilience than participation frequency. The findings support a distinction between participation as institutional contact and participation as an experience of consequential voice, while the cross-sectional design, limited number of communities, incomplete sampling documentation, and absence of item-level measurement documentation constrain generalization and causal interpretation.
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