Cognitive Mapping: Gender Differences in the Perception of Community

The concept of cognitive mapping as drawn from sociological phenomenology is used to clarify the complexity of the concept of community. Fifty residents of a Midwestern rural area were asked to drawn maps of their community. The maps reveal individual differences in the perception of a community and a tendency for the perception of community to vary by gender. Where the activities within a community tend to be segregated, there will also tend to be different viewpoints or cognitive maps of the community.