Variation
between communities/community analysis
While
the survey contained a national reference sample, the heart
of the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey consisted of
40 American communities taking stock of their levels of local
social capital. A website for the Social Capital Community Benchmark
Survey at: http://www.cfsv.org/communitysurvey highlights what
each of the communities believe is interesting about their data,
and compares the communities on the 11 key social capital dimensions
discussed above: social trust, inter-racial trust, conventional
politics participation, protest politics participation, civic
leadership, associational involvement, informal socializing,
diversity of friendships, giving and volunteering, faith-based
engagement, and equality of civic engagement across the community.
Note: we
have chosen to compare the communities using what we call "Community
Quotients." We have done so since the communities sampled
are so varied and since the choice of whom to poll was left
entirely up to the partnering institutions. We needed to standardize
the comparisons so that one community choosing only to sample
the inner city would not be compared falsely to another community
surveying the entire metro area and so that a rural community
could be compared to an urban one. [6]
Along every
dimension of social capital (such as social trust, faith-based
participation, etc.) a community quotient (CQ) score
shows a community's performance on this dimension relative to
what was predicted given its urbanicity, ethnicity, levels of
education and age distribution. A score above 100 indicates
that a community shows more of this community connectedness
than its demographics would predict; conversely, a score below
100 indicates that a community shows less of this type
of social capital than its demographics would suggest. Roughly
68% of all communities would fall in the 85-115 range, and almost
95% of all communities would fall in the 70-130 range.
