Measuring Social Capital: an Exploration in Community– Research Partnership

Large numbers of social policy initiatives and community organizations are currently engaged in “community building” efforts that seek, in part, to strengthen informal relationships and the organizational infrastructure of communities and to build the capacity of communities to manage and foster community change. One critical requirement for improving such practice is for communities to have greater access and capacity to use information for planning, advocacy, and assessment. There are, however, a number of challenges to this, especially as it concerns understanding complex, sometimes elusive, dimensions of community circumstances and dynamics—the level of community “social capital,” for example—that are of central interest to those involved in community-building efforts. The authors describe what was learned through a community–research partnership that attempted to test practical options for community-based organizations (CBOs) to measure aspects of community social capital for their own purposes and within the constraints of budget, time, and skills under which they work. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.