Does visiting a community garden enhance social relations? Evidence from an East European city

ABSTRACT The aim of the article is to identify the impact of the frequency of visits to community gardens in Slovakia with regard to how people perceived the importance of membership of community garden, how satisfied they were in general with community relations in the gardens, how they perceived improved social relations between people, and the influence of the community gardens on the members’ quality of life. A mixed methods approach was adopted comprising a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews. Relationships were tested using Cramer’s V coefficient, the Mann-Whitney U test, and the Kruskal-Wallis test. The analysis of perceptions of the community garden members did not confirm the dependence between the frequency of visits to community gardens and the gardens’ impact on the CG members’ communities. A further finding was that members of community gardens positively rated the relationships in those communities. The authors conclude that there was no evidence of statistical relationships between the variables in their analysed data set. The frequency with which the members visited community garden did not affect the results.