Social capital measures the resources provided by social networks, including day-to-day supports provided by close relations as well as access to information and broader resources provided by extended relationships. Research demonstrates a positive relationship between social capital and education, child well-being, lower crime rates, health, tolerance, happiness, and economic and civic equality.

Metric: Selected questions from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey

These questions measure the resources provided by a person’s social networks, including both close relations and extended relations, and our metric uses a few items from this survey. The questions offer information on the relative strengths and areas for improvement in communities' civic behavior. The metric for social capital is a selection of seven questions from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey covering participation in community organizations, religious attendance, number and racial diversity of friends, engagement with neighborhoods, and the ability to find information on new jobs. These questions provide indicators of generalized social capital, bonding social capital, bridging social capital, and racial diversity of friends at the individual level. See the report for additional details. No widely available data on social capital exist at the local level, so this metric would require new data collection.

Validity: Measures of social capital have repeatedly been shown to be associated with individual and community well-being and upward mobility. However, no standard measure or set of measures exist to capture the relationship between social capital and mobility. Though the survey and larger blocks of questions from the survey have been used in peer-reviewed studies before, the subset of questions for this metric has not yet been validated together. We anticipate using the initial round of data collection to validate this metric for widespread use and to refine and revise as necessary.

Availability: This information is not available widely enough in existing data sources to provide coverage at the local level across many geographies. To ease data collection, we have attempted to minimize the number of questions needed to measure each of the indicators of social capital (e.g., generalized social capital and bridging and bonding social capital).

Frequency: The frequency of how often data for the metric would be collected would depend upon local data collection efforts, but we recommend regular follow-up data collection at least every two years.

Geography: The level of geography that the metric would represent (e.g., county, city, or zip code) would depend on the sampling frame, stratification, and the number of people ultimately surveyed to obtain sufficient power for the survey.

Consistency: The degree of consistency in this metric across different places will vary with the extensiveness of the survey design and number of people surveyed in each place. Ideally, the metric would be consistent across some base level of geography (such as the city or county), but some places would likely have more extensive coverage of residents who have taken the survey.

Subgroups: Like geography, the range of subgroups represented and the ability to compare subgroups (people of color and white people; married and single people; people with children and those without) would depend on the sampling frame, stratification, and the number of people surveyed.

Limitations: The primary limitation is that these data will need to be collected by communities. Additional limitations include the need to further validate this particular set of questions. Original data collection may also make benchmarking against other places challenging depending on the scale and representativeness of data collection in other places.