Piloting the Use of Concept Mapping to Engage Geographic Communities for Stress and Resilience Planning in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Martha Ta and Ketan Shankardass
Additional contact information
Martha Ta: Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada
Ketan Shankardass: Department of Health Sciences, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 20, 1-14

Abstract: The physical and social characteristics of urban neighborhoods engender unique stressors and assets, contributing to community-level variation in health over the lifecourse. Actors such as city planners and community organizations can help strengthen resilience in places where chronic stress is endemic, by learning about perceived stressors and assets from neighborhood users themselves (residents, workers, business owners). This study piloted a methodology to identify Toronto neighborhoods experiencing chronic stress and to engage them to identify neighborhood stressors, assets, and solutions. Crescent Town was identified as one neighborhood of interest based on relatively high levels of emotional stress in Twitter Tweets produced over two one-year periods (2013–2014 and 2017–2018) and triangulation using other neighborhood-level data. Using concept mapping, community members ( n = 23) created a ten-cluster concept map describing neighborhood stressors and assets, and identified two potential strategies, a Crescent Town Residents’ Association and a community fair to promote neighborhood resources and build social networks. We discuss how this knowledge has circulated through the City of Toronto and community-level organizations to date, and lessons for improving this methodology.

Keywords: neighborhoods; chronic stress; community engagement; concept mapping; social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/20/10977/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/20/10977/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:20:p:10977-:d:659655

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().