Missouri Place with the Most 'Community Spirit' is a Real Shocker

I don't mean to judge, but I have to question a new internet conclusion about the Missouri place that has the most 'community spirit'. #1 is surprising to me and #3 is kind of unusual, too.

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I had a nice lady from Remitly reach out about an interesting new study they've done which ranks community spirit for cities around the world. When you just look at Missouri, the top 5 are...interesting.

Here are the top 5 Missouri cities with the most community spirit (allegedly). I've bolded the ones I question:

St. Louis
Kansas City
Springfield
Columbia
Independence

Before I did into the why, let's look at the how question. This is the methodology they mentioned on how they decided which Missouri places had the most "hoorah":

The number of available Meetup groups for each city was divided by the city population size and multiplied by 10,000 to give the number of groups available per 10,000 people

If you're not familiar with that app, Meetup is what it says. It makes it easier to meet up with groups of like-minded individuals. Herein lies the problem I have with it being used as the way to decide what cities have the most community spirit. Don't misunderstand. I love St. Louis and think Springfield is swell, too. But, I'd bet that both cities have more bullet casings lying in the street than community spirit (based on crime numbers).

Even if you just restrict this survey to those 5 cities, I would have guessed that Columbia would dwarf the bigger metros for community spirit. My opinion only.

I'd also bet that most Missourians in small towns probably don't even know what that app is, but have loads more community spirit than the metros. Just inputting my 2 cents here.

The Remitly article is still an interesting read about how cities around the world and their community spirit (in the Meetup app).