Geography and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping are not normally things that we associate with Developmental Assets®. Neither are evolution or the biological sciences. But the Binghamton Neighborhood Project in Binghamton, New York, is not your normal asset project. “The Binghamton Neighborhood Project (BNP) is a collaboration between Binghamton University (BU) faculty and community partners to understand and improve the quality of life in our region,” reads the BNP website. Dr. David Sloan Wilson and his colleagues at BU have shown how the occurrence of Developmental Assets is affected by complex human social behavior and something similar to the short-term evolutionary process in humans.
In a workshop given at the 2007 Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth Conference in Rochester, NY, Dr. Wilson discussed the concept of human behavioral flexibility—a process akin to evolution—where certain social situations can cause a change in physical and social reactions (more about human behavioral flexibility can be read in Dr. Wilson’s article “Health and the Ecology of Altruism”). He spoke of a series of experiments done with hens meant to increase productivity. The tests also measured altruism and selfishness as inherited and inbred traits in the hens. It was found that if the top egg layers from one hen farm were placed in the same cage together, rather than becoming more productive, the hens literally competed to death with each other over the course of six generations, pecking and fighting in an attempt to be the most productive. Productivity plummeted. In contrast, selecting the one cage that was already most productive and breeding that cage to make the next generation of hens produced something akin to inherited cooperation in the hens, and in six generations egg production went off the charts.
How would such an experiment play out in a human situation? While this experiment is clearly not possible to replicate with humans, Wilson conjectures about what might happen when altruistic groups or selfish groups of people get together.
The concentration of social characteristics is where GIS mapping and the Developmental Asset Profile come in. With the help of the school district, Dr. Wilson and his team administered the DAP to over 2000 students in the district. When the survey results came back, the individual results of each of the five subscales measured (personal, social, family, school and community) were mapped out onto neighborhoods of Binghamton, providing visual proof of the strengths and weaknesses surrounding youth in each neighborhood. The following is a brief excerpt from Dr. Wilson’s presentation.
I picked one street, this is Vine St. At the top of Vine, the students are scoring high on the personal subscale and on the bottom of Vine they’re scoring low. Now Binghamton is quite a small city so on my bicycle I can go from the top of Vine to the bottom of Vine in less than a minute…
What is it? We can see the [visual] difference. But to me it is just amazing that those differences are reflected in the heads of the kids in those neighborhoods. They’re going to the same schools, they’re living just blocks apart, but that difference, whatever it might be, is being reflected in the heads of the students reported in the DAP.
Similar differences between students in different neighborhoods could be seen on the maps of many of the other subscales–students lived close to each other but felt dramatic differences in neighborhood, community and social environment.
Many questions are still unanswered- perhaps more than were asked originally. But the Binghamton Neighborhood Project provides a framework for a whole new way to work with and think about assets and the DAP. More information is available on the BNP website where you can find interactive mapping software that allows visitors to the site to create their own map of any number of variables. Also on the site are the rest of the maps of the Developmental Assets categories as they relate to the neighborhoods in Binghamton. More information can also be found on David Sloan Wilson’s blog.
David Sloan Wilson can be reached by phone at (607) 777-4393 or by email at dwilson@binghamton.edu.
Information for this article was taken, in part, from the Binghamton Neighborhood Project website, David Sloan Wilson’s blog and “Health and the Ecology of Altruism” by David Sloan Wilson.
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