Another Look at the NIMBY Phenomenon

report by Piat, The NIMBY Phenomenon: Listening to Community Residents' Concerns about Developing Housing for Deinstitutionalized People, is a very stimulating and challenging piece of qualitative research. It is not only written well, but also deals with a unique and important topic, NIMBY (not in my back yard) phenomenon, that many social workers need to deal with in their community practices. Using a naturalistic paradigm, author reports interesting findings from well-designed based on actual cases of community opposition toward group homes in three Canadian communities. Although NIMBY is as old and common a phenomenon as history of most treatment and rehabilitation facilities in residential areas, strength of this is that it primarily focuses on community residents' viewpoints and perspectives. findings suggest several important implications for social work practitioners and social planners in health care services field. underlying tenet of this appears to be value issues behind community reactions, particularly of opposition side. Social work is a helping profession with specific values. In case of United States, NASW Code of Ethics (as revised, 1997) sets forth values, ethical principles, and professional standards to which all social workers aspire and by which they can be judged. Code delineates six values as key to social work and prescribes ethical principles based on these values. Among these six, first four seem to be particularly related to NIMBY problem: (1) Social workers' primary goal is to help people in need and to address social problems; (2) social workers challenge social injustice; (3) social workers respect inherent dignity and worth of person; (4) social workers recognize central importance of human relationships. All of these values prescribe certain ethical standards that concern social workers' responsibilities to clients, in practice settings, and to broader society as well as to colleagues, as professionals, and to profession. This as field research properly addresses first three constituents very well with a keen perception and balanced assessment. In this study, research design, data gathering technique, analytical and reconstructive scheme are extremely well done. However, there seems to be a lack of clarity in case selection process. Maximum variation may be fine for a small qualitative study, with those five selection variables. However, one (perhaps most important) criteria was not included or specified--timing. author stated that Incidents of community opposition to group homes had occurred during a two-year period at time of study (p. 129), and the group homes had been in operation between four months and one at time of (p. 130). NIMBY, like any other social phenomenon or movement, is time-sensitive. Many problem-focused social activities and phenomenon gradually or even suddenly retard as time passes or as momentum is lost. Thus, exactly when this took place vis-[grave{e}]-vis stage of each group home development would very much determine extent and intensity of communi ty reaction to arrival of such group homes--during planning stage, at beginning, within three months, six months, or a year later. At what point of development or operation data was collected needs to be specified for each case, because that can be an important control variable. sampling of community residents (n = 13) was based on purposive method (names taken from press clippings) and then snowball method (their suggestions). This approach, although useful and popular, may highly skew findings to most outspoken voices in each community, let alone nonrepresentative reactions of each community. An active vocal minority, even though powerful and influential, does not necessarily reflect true reactions of community majority. …

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