Measuring the Strength of Relationships and Communities with the Social Capital Atlas
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How do you measure the strength of the connections in a community—the trust, relationships, and bonds that hold people together. Social capital plays a powerful role in impacting everything from economic mobility to civic participation. But how do we actually quantify these unseen networks?
The Social Capital Atlas can answer that question, mapping out data across U.S. counties and zip codes to show where social capital is strong and where it is lacking.
Using sources like Facebook connections, census data, and voting records, the Atlas paints a picture of how connected communities really are.
It explores three distinct forms of social capital: economic connectedness, or how people from different income backgrounds interact; cohesiveness, reflecting trust and the strength of local relationships; and civic engagement, which looks at volunteerism and community participation.
In this episode, Drew walks you through how to use this tool effectively.
You’ll hear:
(03:19) What social capital actually refers to, including bonding vs. bridging social capital
(07:29) Why should nonprofits care about social capital
(09:33) What is the Social Capital Atlas and what exactly does it measure
(12:08) How to navigate the Social Capital Atlas
Resources Mentioned
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Drew Reynolds: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Common Good Data Podcast. My name is Drew Reynolds. Today, we're going to be exploring the topic of social capital, this idea of understanding that the relationships that we have with others and people around us, um, have important value and can help us to live healthier, uh, and more fulfilling lives.
Social capital is getting a lot of buzz lately, and I keep hearing that term when I talk to different clients out there in the world, in large part because we understand that social capital is connected to a lot of other things that we see as social goods, things like economic opportunity, but also, you know, fighting this, uh, understanding of things like loneliness and isolation, uh, and, and disconnection that we Prevalent in so many different aspects of our lives and our society.
And so today I wanted to spend some time focusing on this concept, concept of social capital, honestly, because it's so hard to make sense of, and because it can be really difficult to [00:01:00] understand empirically when we're trying to measure it. Uh, and so when you want to be able to go out there and make a case about the need for support for social capital in your community, or maybe you're looking to find places where there is social capital.
Some strong social capital that you can try to connect to and get your, uh, your community connected to. Uh, it might be helpful to understand and think about social capital in this broader sense, and which is what we're going to be trying to do today. Now, for those of you who've been listening to this podcast over the last couple of weeks, you know that we've been doing a series that's focusing on accessing sources of data.
Free public sources of data that are out there that you can use, uh, especially when you're trying to do needs assessment. So when you're trying to understand what's going on in your community and how you can access data to tell that story. Uh, so we're gonna explore a wonderful data set called the Social Capital Atlas from Opportunity Insights to be able to do that and continue in this series.
So in the same way that we looked at things like youth mental health and substance use, uh, we, we talked about the, uh, kids count data and how we talked about civic [00:02:00] health index. We're going to do the same with the social capital, uh, the social capital atlas today. Now, before we get started, I do want to draw your attention to a new resource.
So, you know, as social sector leaders out there, you all know how important reliable data is to demonstrating your impact, in particular for winning grants as well. And you probably also know that it can be hard, uh, and time consuming to be able to do that. And it can feel pretty daunting. Really overwhelming.
And so to try to simplify that process for those of you out there who are in this work, I created something called the Data and Evaluation Made Simple Toolkit. And this toolkit offers really clear, really practical steps, uh, to help you get the data that you need for things like community assessments, things like program evaluation and strategic planning.
It'll also show you exactly the types of sources of data that you can use to put together a really solid community needs assessment, especially if you're Particularly in the areas of health, mental health, and human services, um, and then just kind of give you some guidance too on how you might want to collect data, um, and to show impact through a process of program [00:03:00] evaluation.
So, for those of you who have been wondering, how can I write better survey questions, or how can I run a focus group more effectively, or conduct interviews, this tool is for you. So, to check it out, Uh, visit www. commongooddata. com slash simple. Again, that's commongooddata. com slash simple. And you can access that free toolkit there.
So let's dive in to this notion of social capital. And for those of you who may be wondering, what is social capital? Or how might we define social capital? Well, social capital is just this understanding that relationships Have value, have importance. And I don't mean that in this sort of like mechanicistic, mechanistic way, right?
Where you're trying to sort of take advantage of relations that you, relationships that you may have in your life. But rather that the relationships that we have with others are important. They matter to our health, They matter to our well being. Uh, they matter to building a sense of fulfillment and connection in the world.
Now, social capital has been talked about by lots of different researchers and [00:04:00] lots of different sociologists and psychologists and more. Uh, but I think, um, there's, there's one key concept that I think is really important to understand with social capital. And this is talked about a lot in the famous book, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
If, if you're familiar with that one, but it's this notion of bonding and bridging social capital. So, bonding social capital refers to the types of relationships that we, uh, associate with close knit, uh, close relationships with people who are very similar to us. Maybe have a shared identity, shared background, shared set of experiences.
Um, you might think of families, of, uh, close friendships, groups, maybe a church group or something like that. People that you know and are very close to you. You know, a good way of thinking about bonding social capital is that that's the type of social capital that we have. Uh, you know, who's the person that you ask, uh, to bring you some soup when you're sick?
Like those are the people that are a part of your, your bonding, uh, social capital network, right? Your close people that you would call on when you need help, the people that you trust the most, right? Now, that's not the only type of social capital [00:05:00] that we might think about though. We also think oftentimes of relationships in social capital.
called, uh, bridging social capital and bridging social capital refers to kind of not necessarily close relationships. They might be more distant. They might not be personal connections, um, but are really important because they tie people across some of those different social economic or cultural boundaries that often form our world, right?
So you might think of, um, you know, having bridging social capital. Um, When you think about, you know, who would you ask for a reference for a job? You know, like if you were saying like, Hey, I'm trying to find, uh, a new, a new source of employment, you might ask your family and friends, but that network might not be that wide.
And so you're going to cast it out wider and you meet somebody at a networking party, or, uh, you know, it's a friend of a friend or, uh, somebody else that you met, And in a different professional context, you know, that's the type of bridging social capital. And both of these types of social capital are so important.
We need that bonding [00:06:00] social capital to help us when we're down, to help us have a sense of self and identity, to have close friendships that build trust and meaning and relationship. But we also need that bridging social capital that, that get us outside of our daily lives and our close knit communities and worlds and connect us to the broader senses of opportunity Bridging social capital is also really important when we think about mobility and economic opportunity, particularly for individuals who grow up in low income households or in communities that are associated with Uh, you know, with poverty and other sorts of indicators like those because bridging social capital can oftentimes be a window or an opportunity, uh, into, um, accessing greater economic, uh, capital and opportunity.
So that's kind of why we think about bridging social capital a little bit in the context of opportunity. So, why is social capital so important? So, as I kind of alluded to before, That bonding social capital provides that strong support and safety net. [00:07:00] Um, but the challenge can be sometimes, you know, maybe if you're too stuck in your own world, you become insular.
Maybe you lack diverse perspectives. We had a lot of conversations about being stuck in your own bubble, uh, over the last couple of years, right? And bridging social capital also has its advantages and disadvantages, right? So it can open doors to new opportunities. Social integration, but um, you know, they're not the kind of relationships that are going to have the kind of trust and meaning that you might have in bonding social capital.
So again, both of those are going to be really, really important. Now, why is this important to nonprofits and public sector organizations and folks like you out there who are out there doing great work? Well, these, your organizations, right? play a really critical role in connecting people, especially across areas of difference, both culture, cultural and economic, and, and really other forms of difference as well.
And, and nonprofits in particular, you know, kind of create what we think of as social, of, of like civic society, really, you know, we, we think beyond The Business [00:08:00] Sector or the Public Sector, Nonprofits are creating what's not that, which is everything else, which is how we associate with one another through organizations and communities and make sense of a sense of, of, of public life, of civic life, right?
And, uh, if we think, you know, back to maybe, uh, Uh, the examples of, like, Alexi de Tocqueville, who talks about America as this place of org organizers, and that, uh, these organizations are so essential for democracy, you know, non profits really kind of create that. And so, if we think about it as non profit leaders, why is social capital so important?
Well, it's ultimately what you're building. And this goes for really any type of non profit you may be doing. You may work with youth, you may work with older adults, you may work with a particular cultural group, you may focus on health outcomes, you may focus on education outcomes, you may focus on housing outcomes, you may focus on economic opportunity and employment, you may focus on social justice initiatives.
Any of those things may be the content area of what you're doing. But all of those things, are about building relationships and [00:09:00] connection in the community around some type of common goal, which is ultimately about building up a sense of civic society, and in turn, social capital. So, it's important to nonprofits because you're doing this work every day.
You're out there building social capital every day, and so understanding and making sense of Where we see strengths of social capital in our society, maybe where we see weaknesses in our community, and how can we then work to create more opportunities for social capital, particularly those who are most marginalized, who are most, uh, uh, uh, disconnected from those sources of social capital.
So, how might you measure Now, I alluded to this at the beginning, but there's this great tool called the Social Capital Atlas. It's from a organization called Opportunity Insights, uh, which is the, kind of like a, a, a great organization that focuses on making data available for public policy initiatives, uh, run out of Harvard by, you may have heard Raj Chetty as the Harvard economist and his group up there, um, run the [00:10:00] Opportunity Insights, uh, um, program.
So When you're looking at the Atlas, it provides national data mapping social capital at the county and zip code levels. And so it's, what it's doing is, is it's saying what are, what does social capital look like in all of these different communities. across the country. And it does so in a fairly novel way, I think using a very unique set of data to be able to do so.
Because again, how do you measure these types of things, right? And what they do is they use data sources that include Facebook connections, U. S. census data, um, and other national data sets, things like voting records and other things that focus on volunteerism, civic participation, to try to get at this notion of social capital.
And they examine three distinct forms of social capital. The first being Economic connectedness, so measuring the extent to which people from low income backgrounds are connected to those from high income backgrounds. And then they look at [00:11:00] cohesiveness, so the assessing sort of levels of trust and reciprocity within a community, including the strength of Local relationships.
So how connected are you to the people around you? Are your friends that you have also friends with each other? Um, do you share friends in common, that type of thing? That gives you a sense of cohesiveness, right? Are groups well known among each other? Civic engagement is that third thing that they look at too on the Social Capital Atlas, which examines community participation, which includes things like volunteering rates, voting behaviors, A lot of the same indicators that we looked at at the, on the, uh, civic Health Index that we did two weeks ago.
So you can check that set out, episode out as well, uh, to learn more about civic engagement. So those are the three forms of, of social capital to review, economic connectedness, cohesiveness, and civic engagement. So I wanna actually share it with you. So for those of you who, um, are following along on the podcast.
You'll be able to, uh, if you hop over to YouTube, you'll be able to see me actually going through and seeing it on the [00:12:00] website, but you don't necessarily have to see the visuals to be able to follow along, uh, with the podcast today. So, uh, I'll show you where you can access these data. The first thing you can do is, uh, navigate to socialcapital.
org, and on socialcapital. org, You'll be able to, uh, see the social, um, Capital Atlas homepage, and it talks about cohesiveness, economic connectedness, civic engagement, those three things that I just mentioned, um, and sources of data there. I'm going to click on explore the data here. And as we go in, it'll show you this whole tutorial that you can check out.
That'll kind of walk you through the atlas. I'll try and skip that for now, just so you can take a look. And first, what you're presented with is a map of the United States, and you'll see there's blue and red, um, on the first one, and it's measuring economic connectedness. So those blue areas, these are all blue counties.
That, um, are areas where, uh, the, a higher percentage of people are connected to people with higher [00:13:00] incomes. And in the redder areas you'll see that the greater proportion of friendships are in lower areas. And you'll see kind of a bit of a trend that the areas of highest economic connectedness tend to be in the upper Midwest.
Places like Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, uh, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, those kind of areas. A little bit on the East Coast as well. Places like Massachusetts and New Hampshire, you'll also see there, um, are high on the economic connectedness indicators. And then areas where there's low social cohesion tend to be concentrated in the southeast, in states like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and others. And a little bit kind of in the Sun Belt, out to New Mexico, Arizona, California to some extent as well.
So, that's what we're seeing. And, and if you, um, look through on the left hand side, you'll see the three, uh, indicators that we're looking at for social capital. So, economic connectedness being one of them. If you click on cohesiveness, you'll see that the story's a little different. You're not gonna see that they're so highly correlated as they were before.
When it comes to [00:14:00] cohesion, which is a sense, you know, a measure of the degree to which your friends also know each other, That you see is higher, um, if I look, zoom in here on Georgia, you'll see that, uh, the areas of lower cohesion are concentrated around urban areas. So here in Atlanta, you'll see it's lower, and then the green areas in more rural areas, you'll see that it tends to be higher.
It's, it's kind of like, uh, This might be an oversimplification, but it's kind of like a Mayberry situation where, you know, in a smaller town, rural areas, people tend to know each other. There's that sense of strong trust. People know who's on their street, who's down the block. They all went to school together, that sort of thing.
Whereas in urban areas, you might not find that that same phenomenon is the case. And so you see here, areas of higher cohesion in green, and those in lower cohesion in purple. Then we can also look at civic engagement. And you'll see that these data here also map. Kind of like what we saw in the Civic Health Index, where we saw concentrations of lower civic engagement across the South [00:15:00] in comparison to some of the other states in the United States.
But again, here where you see the green, you'll see higher rates of civic engagement. And this one here is measuring volunteering rates. Um, you know, uh, the extent to which people might go out of their way to join an organization and participate in their community. Versus those that do not. And so that's kind of what you see here.
And so, and again, there's some things, areas where these overlap and some where they don't, but it can give you a good sense of what it might look like in your community. Now, the nice thing about this set of data, if I go back to economic connectedness here, because I think this is the one that most folks, uh, listening to this podcast will probably be interested in, you can also look at it by zip code.
You can look at it by high school, interestingly enough, and also by college or university. So you can kind of look at them by some of the different, uh, geographies and kind of ways that we group ourselves as human beings, uh, county and zip code being geographic and then high school and college being a bit more.
Localized, but you can [00:16:00] see a little bit here how that might change. Now if I zoom in here on Atlanta, you'll see actually once you get to the high school level, it kind of tells a different story than you might see at a county level. Similar, but not necessarily the same. So each of these different geographies can be helpful to look at when you're thinking about measuring things like economic connectedness.
Now, if I zoom in here on Atlanta, and I see, I can hover over each one of these counties here on my county level. Here's Cobb County, here is Fulton County, here's DeKalb, and here's Gwinnett. And you can see at the county level, it changes the percentage each time I move by it to show what percentage of people of people who are, um, who are low income have, uh, friends.
What percentage of their friends are also, are then indicated as high income? In a sense, do people who are growing up in situations of low income or in concentrated poverty, do they have access to relationships? with individuals who are, come from a higher income background. And again, as we, as I alluded to at the beginning of this podcast, that's important because we know that [00:17:00] social, um, capital in the context of economic connectedness is actually one of the greatest predictors of economic opportunity.
So if we're thinking, how can we help communities have access to opportunities that would, um, increase incomes, um, and, and take people, um, or give people opportunities that, that extend beyond. I think economic connectedness is one of those things that, you know, the research continues to show we should be looking at.
So you can see that that changes a little bit by county. And you'll see that this probably does overlap a little bit with economic indicators. If you know the cities here well, you can kind of see that. You can kind of see that geographically. When I go into the zip code, though, you'll see that, you know, it's not necessarily the case, uh, uh, that the county level is necessarily the best one to look at because this, these data can be really hyper, hyper localized.
Um, and you can see here in Atlanta that we have pretty, pretty large disparities between South Atlanta and North Atlanta in the areas surrounding it. [00:18:00] If I zoom out,
we can see here again, a similar phenomenon with economic connectedness. To some extent, although it's not exactly perfect in this regard, it tends to be a little bit concentrated around urban areas, kind of the same way that cohesiveness is in the opposite way. So you can kind of see that too. I'll zoom in on another example here.
Here is Charlotte, North Carolina,
and we see a similar pattern with social capital, but That you would see a lot of times in people who listen to this podcast, who know Charlotte well, you know, we often talk about the Crescent, which is that, uh, those zip codes that are just north of the city center, uh, to the West and to the East a little bit too, that former Crescent around the city center tend to be areas where you see some of the Highest, uh, uh, rates of maybe some of the outcomes you're not looking for.
Uh, and then lower rates of things like access to economic opportunity, social capital, and others. And so we see that that reflected here in the [00:19:00] data, data, when you compare a place, um, You know, this geography here, this is kind of the Myers Park area, but I think it's being referred as east over here in Brookhill, Ashbrook, and Colston Village.
You know, when you move just a little bit further to the west, you see a dramatic drop off in the percentage of friends who are high income. So again, I show these data because I I think a lot of times when we look at some of these urban areas, we might look and say, hey, we have a story and we can tell a story about poverty.
We can tell a story about access to housing. We can tell a story about a grade point average and dropout rates in high schools. But I think we sometimes don't always take the time to look at social capital as one of those indicators. You know, is the degree to which you have access to relationships, um, where people, um, have, uh, economic opportunities, social opportunities that maybe somebody who's growing up in poverty might not have access to.
And this is a good way of trying to illustrate and show that, at least in this case, at a geographic level. [00:20:00] Now, when you look at the high schools, you see kind of a similar pattern as well here. Here's the dots and then colleges as well. So that can be kind of a useful indicator when you're looking at Charlotte.
So I'll zoom back out. Now, one of the things that I also think is really cool about these data is that we don't have to only look at it. You know, from a geographic perspective, I'm zooming out here to the entire United States, you can also, um, come over here to explore some of other ways that this amazing data tool, uh, allows you to look at relationships with economic mobility.
So if over here, it says, how does economic connecting this relates to economic mobility? When I click on that, what we can see is a scatterplot here, and that examines economic connectedness and its relationship to upward mobility. So on the Y axis, we have. Low and high upward, um, income mobility. And then on the X axis, we have low and high economic connectedness, right?
And as you hover over each one of these dots, it'll take you to a particular area. So here's an example of Richmond city, Virginia, where you see that it's a little bit on the lower, um, [00:21:00] end of the perspective, or sorry, a lower end of the spectrum when it comes to, um, income, but also low on, on economic mobility.
Now, if we kind of move all the way up here. And kind of scroll through, we'll start to see what are some of these counties up here that have high income and also high income mobility.
And you see that, that there's, there's a correlation there that as economic connectedness increases, so too does upward economic, um, income mobility. Right? And if you hover over these, it'll show you how these are measured or how they're defined. So in this case, upward income mobility is defined as the average income in adulthood for children from low income families.
And down here on economic connectedness, you see the share of high or above median income friends among people. with low or below median incomes. So it's interesting you do see that correlation there between the two variables. If I click on what determines level of economic connectedness, um, you can kind of take a look too about other ways that you can do, uh, uh, explore [00:22:00] the data from scatter plots to maps.
To strip plots as well, that give you a sense of how one variable in the data set might be connected to another. I also think it's really cool to click this focus button. That kind of helps you navigate a little bit of focus. And I'm particularly here. I can focus in on the state of Georgia, looking at economic connectedness, switch between cohesiveness.
And then also Civic Engagement gives you a nice way of quickly navigating the data geographically and across your different variables. So anyways, I'll let you take some time and encourage you to explore the Opportunity Insights Social Capital Atlas. It's a great tool. I think it's really wonderful when it comes to telling stories.
Understanding your community, doing needs assessment. Some of the things that help you better understand your own community, but also how to communicate that to others, particularly for those nonprofits who are interested in building a sense of social connection and building social capital for those that you serve.
So, um, Anyways. I hope that this has been a useful [00:23:00] introduction to you, to the Social Capital Atlas. If you'd like to learn more about it or, or, or get access to it, just go to social capital.org. We'll also have some great show notes on our podcast@www.com, good data.com/podcast as always, and so I encourage you to check out the resources on those websites.
And until then, have a great week.
