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Christopher Thatcher

6 February 2020

ENC 1102

Professor Mooney

The Effects of Social Capital in Crime Ridden Rural Areas

I originally started with researching the Supreme Court as my chosen discourse

community and wanted to see their lack of view on student free speech. However, that research

turned up a cold shoulder and I was led to look elsewhere. I have found a new research topic and

discourse community. My new chosen discourse community is a crime ridden rural

neighborhood. And that may be confusing for some people but explaining it might rationalize

how it works. “With the term discourse communities, the focus is on texts and language, the

genres and lexis that enable members throughout the world to maintain their goals, regulate their

membership, and communicate effectively with one another.” (Johns 321). A rural neighborhood

can be a discourse community because the people in that neighborhood share common goals of

safety and effective functioning. Through communications like local town meetings and a

neighborhood watch program, the people are able to keep crime reduced. Lexis like safety and

prosperity are very common throughout rural neighborhoods. Some genres used by rural

communities include social media to keep the people informed about what is going on, and they

also use newspapers to keep the older members of the neighborhood up to date with everything

that is going on.

Another way to analyze the rural neighborhood discourse community is to look at their

activity system. “Activity systems consist of the interactions among all factors that come to bear

on an activity at a given point in time” (Kain and Wardle 401). Activity theory and activity
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systems look at how a certain discourse community functions with daily objectives. A good

activity to look at is a local election for mayor or town council. The objective of the people is to

elect either a new mayor or people for the town council. A motive for this is that they want the

best person or people in power to ensure the best safety and prosperity for their neighborhood.

And the outcome of the election is hopefully the right people in power to ensure change is on the

way.

The main reason I wanted to research this topic is because crime in cities is always talked

about often overlooking the crime in rural areas when the crime in rural areas can be just as

serious. Rural area crime can include things from serious drug dealers to larceny to bulgarly to

even serial murder. I am a criminal justice major and am really fascinated by looking at crime in

different backgrounds but rural areas really strike me as interesting as the people in rural areas

are usually more together than the citizens in a city. And using social capital theory is also an

important part of my research and I decided to use it because of my interest in sociology and

seeing how different societies or groups of people interact with each other and function on a

daily basis. “Social capital has been defined, broadly, as social networks, the reciprocities that

arise from them, and the value of these for achieving mutual goals” (Vorhaus 186). Social capital

is a theory that can take on many different aspects either socially, economically, or even

politically. Connecting rural communities with social capital, rural communities have higher

poverty rates than cities, aka metropolitan areas, and have less awareness of chronic health

diseases. Social capital takes into account two major measures when talking about rural

communities. “Along with this index, we use two additional measures of social capital: safety

and residential stability. Safety is a factor score based on the incidence of a variety of crimes,

and is used to reflect the absence of mutual trust and a sense of safety (and thus weaker social
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capital).” (Yang, Jensen, and Haran 356). This is important to note because rural communities

value safety and reduced crime rates.

When talking about the types of crime in rural communities, they usually do not tend to

be crimes in the cities like mass shootings or murders. The crimes committed in rural

communities like previously stated include burglary, larceny, etc. One major problem is drug

abuse in rural communities. Not just any kind of drug use, but more importantly stimulant use.

Some of the major stimulants used are meth and cocaine. There are records of major availability

of both meth and cocaine in rural areas, especially among the youth of these communities. “In

addition, a report by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (2000) indicates that

rural eighth graders (who are approximately 13 to 14 years old) are significantly more likely to

have used cocaine, crack, amphetamines, and methamphetamines in the past year when

compared to eighth graders in large metropolitan areas.” (Oser, Leukefeld, Staton-Tindall,

Duvall, Garrity, Stoops, Falck, Wang, Carlson, Sexton, Wright, and Booth 602). Eighth graders

are abusing stimulants in rural areas, which clearly goes against the values of safety and stability

in rural communities. Some other crimes with high rates in rural areas include larceny and

burglary. Improving social capital in these areas can help raise crime awareness and reduce

crime in these areas. “ Conflicting social, or cultural, values lead to breakdowns or shifts in trust,

and changing social controls lead to conflict within the community, again setting the stage for

criminal activity. This is most evident in communities that are undergoing rapid social and

economic changes, whether real or perceived.” (Deller and Deller 229). Social capital is

important in keeping crime rates down and promoting togetherness at the same time.

With all this background of the work in the field, that high social capital in rural areas

leads to reduced crime, but low social capital leads to high crime rates. And the crimes
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highlighted in rural communities are primarily drug problems, larceny, and burglary. Promoting

social capital is important in keeping crime rates down in rural areas. Using these frameworks, I

will attempt to answer the question of How promoting social capital in rural communities help

reduce crime and promote safety and residential stability?

Collecting primary research in this area is crucial in answering my research question. To

do this, I plan on doing a lot of textual analysis. Looking at crime reports and records will give

me a basis to see what crimes are being committed and what ages the criminals are. Another

textual analysis I plan on completing a multimodal analysis of social media posts of rural

neighborhoods promoting neighborhood watch programs or local elections to see how the people

respond to that. But the biggest textual analysis comes from the police records and crime reports.

I plan on analyzing a bunch of different crime reports and police records from different rural

communities across the United States to compare the crime rates and see if they have strong

social capital or not.

Works Cited

Deller, Steven, and Melissa Deller. “Spatial Heterogeneity, Social Capital, and Rural

Larceny and Burglary.” Rural Sociology, vol. 77, no. 2, June 2012, pp. 225–253.

EBSCOhost,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2012.00076.x
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Johns, M. Ann. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice.” Writing about

Writing, edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford St. Martin, 2017, pp.

319-342.

Kain, Donna and Wardle, Elizabeth. “Activity Theory: An Introduction for the Writing

Classroom.” Writing about Writing, edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs,

Bedford St. Martin, 2017, pp. 395-406.

Oser, Carrie, et al. “Criminality among Rural Stimulant Users in the United States.”

Crime & Delinquency, vol. 57, no. 4, July 2011, pp. 600–621. EBSCOhost,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011128708325048

Vorhaus, John. “Function and Functional Explanation in Social Capital Theory: A

Philosophical Appraisal.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 33, no. 2, Mar. 2014,

pp. 185–199. EBSCOhost, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9380-5

Yang, Tse-Chuan, et al. “Social Capital and Human Mortality: Explaining the Rural

Paradox with County-Level Mortality Data.” Rural Sociology, vol. 76, no. 3, Sept. 2011,

pp. 347–374. EBSCOhost,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2011.00055.x