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

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: chronic stress; community engagement; concept mapping; neighborhoods; social media.

Figure 1

Cluster map of neighborhood chronic stressors (right) and assets (left) prior to stage of interpretation.