1 Measuring Social Capital: Towards a standardised approach Wendy Stone & Jody Hughes Australian Institute of Family Studies Wendy Stone Research Fellow and Project Manager wendy.stone@aifs.gov.au 03 9214 7820 Paper presented at the 2002 Australasian Evaluation Society International Conference October/November 2002 – Wollongong Australia. www.aes.asn.au Abstract ‘Social capital’ is often equated with notions of strong or prosperous communities and has been heralded as the glue that holds communities together. Yet, it is an empirically elusive concept and still little is known about social capital in practice – particularly as it features in different types of families and communities. As a result the tasks of measuring, evaluating and understanding how social capital might best be facilitated in policy or service provision remain problematic. This paper briefly describes current work being undertaken by the authors that attempts to overcome some of these problems. The paper describes a conceptual framework for social capital measurement and the development of various approaches to analysis useful in different types of evaluation and research settings. This work is used as a departure point for a brief discussion of some key issues raised by this and other work in standardising social capital measurement for evaluation research. Introduction Social capital can be understood as networks of social relations characterised by norms of trust and reciprocity, that can facilitate outcomes at varying social scales, from program and practice levels to the level of communities and nation states. The essence of social capital is quality social relations. It is the quality of relationships, understood through the use of the concept ‘social capital’, which affects the capacity of people to come together to collectively resolve problems they face in common (Stewart-Weeks and Richardson 1998: 2), and achieve outcomes of mutual benefit (Lochner et al 1999). Thus, social capital can be understood as a resource to collective action, which may lead to a broad range of outcomes, of varying social scale. Currently there is much emphasis within policy and practice upon ‘building social capital’. This interest stems primarily from the wide-spread shift that has occurred, away from crisis intervention, towards prevention and early intervention. For example, in Australian public policy, social capital is considered central to reversing the tide of community decline and as an essential component of ‘community strengths’. Additionally, with the same focus upon prevention and early intervention, service providers are increasingly aware of the role they might play in enhancing the social capital of ‘clients’ and the communities in which they operate, by enhancing the quality of social relationships through changing the way services are delivered. This awareness extends the role of services from a model in which they are service providers only, to one in which organisations make explicit their capacity to facilitate change within the lives of individuals, families and communities. The policy and practice emphasis upon building, facilitating and promoting social capital as a means of achieving prevention and early intervention brings into sharp relief the need for measures of social capital. Specifically, the general aim of promoting social capital implies a need to first benchmark existing ‘stocks’ of social capital, evaluate over time the relationship between policy or practice and changes in ‘levels’ or types of social capital, and monitor changes to social capital within various settings – for example from micro analyses within one program, to a whole of community evaluation. Clearly, to maximise the strength of a developing evidence base around the relationship between policy, practice and social capital, standardised approaches and measures of social capital are essential.