For the most part, the proposition has been discussed in the positive sense: that is, by providing contact persons and organizations within the ethnic group, groups that are denser (involving a higher proportion of community residents) facilitate the integration of immi- grants into the wider society (see Johnson and Saroka, 1999; Cardak and McDonald, 200 ; Sanders, 2002) and reduce the likelihood [...] To be sure, there were no separate measures of “active participation” in the 2000 ESC survey, so the researchers were limited in this regard, but most of the contemporary research in the area of voluntary association involvement has involved the use of measures such as number of memberships involving unpaid voluntary work (see Curtis, Baer, and Grabb, 2001; Ruiter and de Graaf, 2006) or actual hou [...] However advantageous the sample size of over ,000 is in rela- tion to previous samples in the 1,000-2,000 range, in the absence of specific ethnic group oversamples, it provides insufficient Ns to perform analyses on specific countries of origin, with the possible exception of China (N=141), India (N=82), the Philippines (N=-57), England or Scotland (N=117) or the USA (N=57). [...] One of the research questions to be addressed here is whether immigrant group size in the community (that is, immigrant/ethnic group density or the proportion of respondents in the community from the same country of origin) has an effect on civic engagement. [...] For each of the immigrant groups (except the “other” category), a level-2 variable is constructed representing the proportion of individuals in the community in that group.