Week 10: Describing Membership in Nongeographical Communities

Objectives

• • Critique and apply knowledge to understand person and environment by exploring the meaning of nongeographical community.

  • Examine the nongeographical communities to which belong.

  • Assess the strengths and weaknesses of membership in nongeographical communities.

Instructions

• Review the content on nongeographical communities.

• Identify at least one nongeographical community to which you or someone you know well belongs to (e.g. professional, spiritual, ethnic, racial, sexual orientation, etc.).

• Based on the nongeographical community you identified, address the following questions below.

Questions

• Provide identifying information about the nongeographical community you are discussing (i.e. name of it, what kind of community is this, what is its purpose, etc.).

• Briefly discuss why you believe this community meets the qualifications for being a nongeographical community as opposed to a geographical community?

• What are the strengths of the community to which you or the person you know well belong?

• What do you believe are the weaknesses inherent in that community?

• What do you believe are the reasons you or the person you know well belong to that community?

• How does membership in that community affect your or the person you know well life?

For this week's discussion, you will consider your geographic community of origin.  Thinking about your origin community, address the following questions:

a.  What is your community's population size?  On what are you are basing this information?

b.  What is your community's population density?  How do you know this to be accurate?

c.  How heterogeneous is the community with respect to residents’ socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic background, and age range?

d.  Is your origin community an urban community (metropolitan or micropolitan) or a smaller community (a small city, a small town, a bedroom community, an institutional community, a reservation community, or a rural community)?

e.  How would you describe this community in terms of its basic characteristics (e.g., comfortable, crowded, sparsely populated, middle-class, poor)?

f.  Based on your earliest memory of your origin community, in what ways has it changed or stayed the same today?

**Be sure to respond to classmates' posts. Remember to include APA citation and reference in your initial post.