Demographic and Psychographic Antecedents of Community Participation: Applying a Social Marketing Model

Abstract

Community participation has received a great deal of attention in recent work on political and health communication. Reflective of the extent of collective action in a community, community participation has typically been treated as a macro-level variable. Building on recent research that points out the role of trait-level variables in the production of community participation, this article serves two different purposes. First, based on the notion of a web of congruent activities, interests, and opinions, it proposes a series of psychographic variables in the context of their relationship with community participation. Second, it proposes the use of demographic and psychographic variables to strategically target highly engaged individuals and communities as sites for interventions and social marketing strategies to increase the participation in less involved communities.