Social capital: a guide to its measurement

Abstract

The primary aims of this paper are to review the concept of social capital and related constructs and to provide a brief guide to their operationalization and measurement. We focus on four existing constructs: collective efficacy, psychological sense of community, neighborhood cohesion and community competence. Each of these constructs taps into slightly different, yet overlapping, aspects of social capital. The existence of several instruments to measure each of these constructs calls for further study into their use as measures of social capital. Despite differences in the approach to measurement, there is general agreement that community characteristics, such as social capital, should be distinguished from individual characteristics and measured at the community level.

Introduction

Researchers are increasingly interested in studying the effects of the social environment on health (Marmot, 1998). Recent examples of studies in which researchers have attempted to establish aspects of the social environment as determinants of health include: the effects of income inequality on mortality (Kaplan et al., 1996, Kennedy et al., 1996, Wilkinson, 1996); the links between residential segregation and black infant mortality (LaVeist, 1993, Polednak, 1997); and the impact of neighborhood deprivation on coronary risk factors (Diez-Roux et al., 1997), low birthweight (Roberts, 1997), homicide (Shihadeh and Flynn, 1996), morbidity (Robert, 1998) as well as all-cause mortality (Haan et al., 1987, LeClere et al., 1997). The emphasis on the characteristics of places in these studies is in marked contrast to much of contemporary epidemiological practice, which tends to focus almost exclusively on the individuals who live in them and their risk behaviors (Macintyre et al., 1993). However, even with the growing interest in examining the relationship of the social environment to health, there remains the challenging task of identifying which ecologic characteristics of communities and societies that matter for population health status.

One characteristic that has generated considerable attention is the concept of ‘social capital’. The concept of social capital originated in the fields of sociology and political science to explain how citizens within certain communities cooperate with each other to overcome the dilemmas of collective action, but recently public health researchers have turned to the notion of social capital to explain heterogeneities in population health status across geographic areas (Kawachi and Kennedy, 1997, Kawachi et al., 1997a). Indeed the relevance of ‘social capital’ to public health has deep historical roots. Just over a hundred years ago, Emile Durkheim demonstrated that social integration was inversely related to the suicide rate in societies (Durkheim, 1897 (1951). Since Durkheim, there have been a variety of attempts to conceptualize and measure societal characteristics such as social integration, social cohesion and most recently, social capital.

The aims of the present paper are: to provide a brief overview of the concept of social capital, to review the theory and approaches to measuring constructs apparently related to social capital; and to point out directions for further research.

We focus our review on four existing constructs: collective efficacy, psychological sense of community, neighborhood cohesion and community competence. Each of these existing constructs seem to capture some fundamental aspect of social capital. We discuss each of these constructs in terms of their measurement and their relationship to social capital.