Social Capital

Building on the work of sociologist James Coleman, political scientist Robert Putnam popularized the term social capital to describe how basic features of civic life, such as trust in others and membership in groups, provides the basis for people to engage in collective action. Even though social capital is not explicitly political, it structures various types of activities that are essential to maintaining civil and democratic institutions. Thus, social capital is defined as the resources of information, norms, and social relations embedded in communities that enable people to coordinate collective action and to achieve common goals.

It is important to recognize that social capital involves both psychological (e.g. trusting attitudes) and sociological (e.g. group membership) factors and, as such, is a multi-level construct. At the macro level, it is manifested in terms of connections between local organizations, both public and private. At the meso level, it is observed in the sets of interpersonal networks of social affiliation and communication in which individuals are embedded. And at the micro level, it can be seen in the individual characteristics that make citizens more likely to participate in community life, such as norms of reciprocity and feelings of trust in fellow citizens and social institutions.

Research on social capital, despite its multi-level conception, has focused on the micro level with individuals as the unit of analysis, typically using cross-sectional surveys to measure citizens' motivation, attitudes, resources, and knowledge that contribute to the observable manifestation of social capital: civic participation. The meso-network level is represented through individuals' reports of their egocentric networks in terms of size and heterogeneity as well as frequency of communication within these networks. Examinations of individuals' connections to community institutions [Page 825]and the connections among them are rare. These studies have been restricted to examining individuals' perceptions and attitudes regarding specifie local institutions and the community generally (e.g. community attachment) as they relate to participation.

Most prominent among these institutional assessments has been political trust or trust in government, again measured mainly through individual-level survey assessments. Trust developed in interactions with social groups and government institutions is thought to function as a heuristic that is applied to decisions to participate in collective action efforts and is seen as foundational to the decision to become involved in civic life. The experience of participating in community projects, volunteering, and engaging in other membership activities reinforces feelings of trust and norms of cooperation, encouraging future civic involvement.

Survey measurement of civic participation, discussion networks, and social trust have often centered on the relationship between these indicators of social capital and patterns of media use. Survey evidence largely confirms that participation and trust have slipped in tandem, contributing to the erosion of community life. Changes in media adoption and use—for example, rising rates of television usage and declines in newspaper readership—across generational cohorts is thought to explain this decline, with television use both privatizing leisure time and presenting an increasingly harsh picture of the social world in televised representations of social reality. The combination was theorized to explain the correspondence between the rise in television use and the decline in social capital. Recent survey evidence from Dhavan Shah and his colleagues, from both cross-sectional assessments and panel survey designs, calls these assumptions into question. Instead, this research finds viewing news, documentary, and dramatic content can have pro-civic effects. This logic has been extended to the Internet, which has also been found to sustain social capital when used to gather information and strengthen social linkages.

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