There Are Various Methods Used to Describe Communites.

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There are various methods that are used to understand “communities” and each method has advantages and disadvantages. Discuss this statement using four examples of the types of methods that may be used. What is a community, Bell and Newby (1971) found 94 definitions, therefore in order to understand the various methods used to understand communities, we need to understand what a community is. Could it be imagination? People talk about community spirit, this is not something that is a place or social, it is a sense of feeling. What about community as a locality, how far could this be broken down to? European Community, Country, City, Town, Village, Suburb or even a street. Looking at community as a social item, could this be societies, as in The Masons, Rotary, Guides, Scouts, ethnicity. Have we lost the sense of community or is it still there? Sociologists in the late 19th century, suggested it was the decline of the medieval guilds, which were across Europe and were untied by their trade, which led to a loss of the sense of community (Delanty 2003). Ferdinand Tonnies a German sociologist wrote about Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, originally published in 1887, (Mooney, Neal 2009) He identified two distinct sets of social relations. Gemeinschaft, the term he used to describe rurally and locally based unified and traditional community; and Gesellschaft, the term he used to describe urbanised, fragmented and modern society. When the book was originally published transportation was not as it is today, so rurally and locally based was a community, with various forms of transport now available migration is easy and the idea of a traditional rural community has changed. Young and Willmott, 1957 did a study of people from Bethnal Green, and noticed that they did not move from their district, staying close to their families, and knowing people within their
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