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Revisiting Declines in Social Capital: Evidence from a New Measure

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Abstract

In the late twentieth century, researchers began calling attention to declining social capital in America and the potential consequences of this trend for a healthy society. While researchers empirically assessed the decline in social capital from the mid-1900s onward, this line of research diminished when the major source of data, the General Social Survey, stopped fielding critical questions in 2004. We do not know, therefore, whether social capital, especially associational social capital, has declined, stabilized, or even increased in a twentyfirst century America. In this paper, we develop a new measure of associational social capital using a confirmatory factor analysis of six indicators from the Civic Engagement Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 2008–2011 and 2013. Our findings support previous research suggesting that associational social capital does not seem to be declining over time. However, we do find evidence of a nonlinear decrease in associating during the Great Recession years. Across the entire time period, though, membership in groups has not declined and there has been little practical change in the amount of time that individuals spend with neighbors. Our analysis of the variance of social capital also shows no general change in the national dispersion of social capital from 2008 to 2013. The paper advances the measurement of social capital and updates our understanding of its possible decline.

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Notes

  1. Measures in Europe tend to use the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey (e.g., Sarracino and Mikucka 2017; Bjørnskov and Sønderskov 2013).

  2. Unfortunately, questions on generalized trust were not available in the Current Population Survey. Single years have questions on trust in neighbors and confidence in a few institutions (corporations, the media, and public schools) but these are not available in 2008, 2009 and 2010. So we are unable to include an additional factor to measure trust or analyze recent trends in trust.

  3. We use modification indices to assess if the fit of our model would improve by correlating the errors between any pair of measured variables. Results demonstrate that including any additional correlations beyond those already present does not substantially improve model fit.

  4. The study of trends in social capital is not solely confined to the American context (e.g., Sarracino and Mikucka 2017).We argue, however, that sustained interest in declines in social capital in the United States is a good justification for choosing it as a focal country in the exploration of our new measure. Future research in other countries should similarly take up the call to investigate trends in associational social capital along with other dimensions of social capital. An international and comparative approach would contribute significantly to general theories on how macro-level institutional contexts can help or hinder the growth of associational social capital while controlling for cultural differences.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of grants from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) (201502185 PI: Paxton) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24 HD42849, PI: Mark Hayward; T32 HD007081-35, PI: R. Kelly Raley) to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E 23rd St, A1700, CLA 3.306, Austin, TX, 78712-1086, USA

    Inbar Weiss, Pamela Paxton, Kristopher Velasco & Robert W. Ressler

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  1. Inbar Weiss
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Weiss, I., Paxton, P., Velasco, K. et al. Revisiting Declines in Social Capital: Evidence from a New Measure. Soc Indic Res 142, 1015–1029 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1956-6

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