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Overview
The
opportunity and challenge of faith-based civic engagement.
The
opportunity and challenge of diversity
Community
connectedness linked to happiness and vibrant communities
Dimensions
of social capital
Variation
between communities/community analysis
Survey
design, methodology, and other housekeeping details
Raw
data available from Roper Center
Table
1
Communities Surveyed, Geography of Area, and Sample Size
Table
2
Effective Sample Sizes and 95% Confidence Intervals for Percentage
Estimates
Legend
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Social
Capital Community Benchmark Survey
Executive Summary [1]
Press
Release
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Overview
In
a historic partnership, some three-dozen community foundations
have committed themselves to a long-term campaign to rebuild levels
of connectedness in their communities. They will take the lead
in catalyzing community action and in funding innovative approaches
to increasing the stock of social capital. As the first step of
this campaign, they have undertaken a massive scale survey to
conduct "community physicals" using the Social Capital
Community Benchmark Survey. The survey maps the relative strengths
and areas for improvement in their communities' civic behavior
and sets a baseline against which future progress can be assessed
in another survey several years hence.
The effort
builds on the work of Prof. Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling
Alone: Collapse and Revival of the American Community (Simon &
Schuster, 2000), that details how markedly our civic ties have
weakened over the last generation and the price we pay for these
frayed ties in the quality of our education, our physical health
and happiness, the safety on our streets, the responsiveness of
democratic institutions of government, and in economic development.
While Putnam's previous work and others' research was designed
to measure trends in civic engagement over time, the Social Capital
Community Benchmark Survey is useful not for assessing our past
civic trajectory but to analyzing differences in civic engagement
across place.
The
community foundations' effort will also build on the strategies
for civic revitalization outlined in Better Together – the report
of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. [The report
is available online at: www.bettertogether.org.] The report –
the culmination of three years of dialogue among a diverse group
of thinkers and doers – details promising strategies for increasing
our social capital through faith-based efforts, schools and youth,
the workplace, politics, and the arts.
The
Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey is comprised of a national
sample of 3,000 respondents and representative samples in 40 communities
nationwide (across 29 states) covering an additional 26,200 respondents.
The Survey
is the largest scientific investigation of civic engagement ever
conducted in America. President Bush began his presidency by exhorting
us to be ‘citizens, not spectators’ and to serve our nation ‘beginning
with your neighbor’, and built on the Clinton Administration's
similar interest in civic engagement. Given this backdrop, the
Survey represents an extraordinary and enormous trove of data
for policy makers, researchers, and community-builders. Investigations
to-date have only begun to scratch the richness of the survey
data. The trends discussed are generally rather robust, but every
generalization may not necessarily be true of every part of the
country, and probably is not true for some communities represented
by this survey.
The
Survey, in addition to revealing the character of civic engagement
in each community, suggests two very large challenges and opportunities
across all the communities sampled:
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