There has been a sharp decline since before the pandemic in the share of Granite Staters who feel they matter in their communities, researchers found in a report released Tuesday.
It’s one of several indicators of civic health – defined by researchers as behaviors, beliefs, and actions related to civic engagement – measured in the 2024 New Hampshire Civic Health Report released by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. Researchers found declining levels of connection, neighborly favors, and participation in public meetings in the state.
Because of recent events – the pandemic, racial and social justice movements, the 2020 presidential election, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack – the researchers felt an urgency to reassess the state’s civic health following the last report in 2020. People are also feeling economic pressures related to housing insecurity, health care, and child care, researchers said.
“We thought to ourselves, wow, we really need to figure out what’s going on with civic health more immediately than waiting a few more years, as we usually do,” said Quixada Moore-Vissing, a Carsey faculty fellow, during a Wednesday webinar on the report, “because there have been so many things that could affect how we’re interacting across civic engagement in New Hampshire.”
The report was released with a little less than a month until the general election on Nov. 5. It’s a statewide look at civic health in a country where many citizens lack confidence in the political system and increasingly view those in the opposing political party in deeply negative ways, Pew Research Center has found.
It’s also a country where many people feel lonely and isolated, issues U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has identified as “profound threats to our health and well-being.” In a 2023 advisory, he pointed to research that found the mortality impact of social disconnection to be as severe as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“It’s, you know, essentially one of the new killers,” Moore-Vissing said of loneliness. “And so this is where we kind of see civic health starting to affect mental health and physical health.”
Here are some key takeaways from the report – and how things can get better.
Fewer residents feel they matter
In 2019, 76 percent of adult residents felt they mattered in their communities. In 2023, that number dropped to just 43 percent, the report found. (The report analyzed several years of data from UNH Survey Center’s Granite State Poll and the U.S. Census Current Population Survey.)
For those between the ages of 50 and 64, “mattering” fell from 81 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2023. The decline was also especially pronounced in the North Country, where mattering fell from 85 percent to 34 percent.
On the specific categories like age and region, Moore-Vissing said to take the results with “a little bit of a grain of salt” because of small sample sizes.
“It sort of shows us that there may be an issue here,” she said, “but we really want to do some follow-up research to confirm that.”
Mattering is connected to other civic health factors, Moore-Vissing said. Whether you have a neighbor who can help you in a crisis or just with taking out your air conditioner, whether you feel dismissed by a public official after sharing at a public meeting – “those are the kinds of things that affect how people feel like they matter in their communities,” she said.
Researchers found that 49 percent of people felt they belonged, and 62 percent felt connected to their communities; those questions weren’t asked in 2019. Eighty-nine percent of residents said in 2023 that they felt they could make an impact in their communities, compared to 93 percent in 2019.
Less connectionResearchers also found declining levels of connection.
The share of those who do favors for their neighbors halved, falling from 11 percent in 2019 to 5 percent in 2021. In the same time frame, there were slight declines (from 85 percent to 81 percent) in those who hear from or spend time with family and friends and in those who work with their neighbors to do positive things for their communities (from 27 percent to 21 percent). Researchers did not find significant changes in volunteering or giving.
The national average of those who do neighborly favors is low at about 10 percent in 2021, Moore-Vissing said. Still, the new data puts New Hampshire at about half that level.
“I think the question here is: Is this decline in social connectivity temporary due to the pandemic?” she said. “You know, we certainly hope so, but this could also be connected to some bigger picture issues.”
New Hampshire remains ahead of the rest of the nation in participation in public meetings, even with a drop after the pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, public meeting attendance in the state fell from 19 percent to 12 percent.
Moore-Vissing said she would expect to see a rebound if this was measured again in a few years, as people may have been avoiding public gatherings out of fear of contracting COVID-19. However, if those numbers don’t return to where they were, “it indicates that there’s something else affecting why people aren’t attending public meetings,” she said.
She said, too, that though public meeting attendance was higher than the national average, it was still quite low.
“We have room to grow in this area, and so does the nation,” she said.
The researchers also found that a slight majority of residents reported engaging frequently with someone of a different racial, ethnic, and cultural background than their own; there was not a 2019 comparison in the report. These numbers were much lower for those over 65, at 30 percent, than between 35 and 49, at 63 percent, Moore-Vissing said.
Solutions
Michele Holt-Shannon, director of New Hampshire Listens at the Carsey School, lives in what she called a “front porch neighborhood.” She said there’s a fair amount of interaction when people sit out front and say hello to each other and those passing by.
“It seems like a small thing maybe,” Holt-Shannon said, “but I was visiting a friend, and they all had back decks in their neighborhood, and it had an impact on the amount of interaction that they had.” Michele Holt-Shannon, director of New Hampshire Listens at the Carsey School, speaks during a webinar. (Claire Sullivan | New Hampshire Bulletin)
It illustrates how even the physical infrastructure of a neighborhood can influence social interaction. In terms of building connection and engagement, “starting locally is really one of the most powerful things that people can do,” she said, whether that’s getting people together for an initiative like a town cleanup or increasing family engagement in your schools.
“One of the things that we’ve noticed for a while is that even though the national spheres feel really fraught, there’s a lot of power in what you can do locally,” she said.
Holt-Shannon also recalled one of the first times she attended a public meeting in the state as a new resident. She didn’t want to walk to the front of the room in front of everyone to get an agenda, and the only seats left were in the first three rows – which she realized were empty because those were the ones that were on TV.
Being greeted by a fellow resident who can explain those “little codes” can help those feelings of uncertainty and nervousness fade, and lets people know that it matters that they are there, she said.
Moore-Vissing also encouraged the use of hands-on civic education. She pointed to a town where she said there was an open meeting that explained how the school board worked and suggested this could be expanded to other government bodies.
Even simply talking to those you disagree with – and listening – is important for connection and bridging divides, Holt-Shannon said.
“There’s something about it that helps us feel connected in the bigger sense, even if we disagree on an issue in front of us,” Holt-Shannon said.
Source: This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin, Claire Sullivan
Photo by Ulkar Batista: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-city-street-with-buildings-and-a-clock-tower-28224399/
