My name is David Wellman and I moved to St. George 5 years ago from Central Oregon. I first started school here at Dixie with the idea of becoming a personal trainer. I changed my mind after my first year of school and decided to take up Psychology. Interestingly enough I did not enjoy that so I took up Criminal Justice. I loved my Criminal Justice classes and found that Integrated Studies was the only degree with Criminal Justice at the time (that has since changed). Recently I decided I missed using Math in school so I dropped Psychology and took on Business. I am currently a Junior but I am in my fourth year here at DSU.
My initial concept of neighborhood compared to community was that community could be anything from your close friends to an entire town. Community in my mind was a group of people that had similar interests or goals. An example of a community could be an adult softball league, the people in the league could be from all different "neighborhoods" within a town but have formed their own community. Adversely, a neighborhood was a specific location within a town or state (small towns generally are just one neighborhood). However, neighborhoods could be communities as well. After reading and watching the posted videos I feel my understanding of the two terms is fairly accurate.
I liked how the reading addresses each factor that influence neighborhoods and clearly lines out what is to come throughout the rest of the book. I am curious to read about how dramatic neighborhood effects actually create individuals. Chicago is a perfect city to perform such a study due to it's diversity and larger size. Chicago also has a unique setting with it's higher crime rate compared to much of the rest of the country.
