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Measurement of Social Participation and its Place in Social Capital Theory

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Abstract

The concept of social capital has become very popular but its definition and measurement are still rather unclear. We frame our study in one of its components, social participation. In this article we develop an optimal measure for social participation based on the questions asked in the first round of the European Social Survey. Our analyses suggest that a distinction has to be made between informal and formal participation because they relate very differently to other variables such as age, education, political action and happiness. We also found that these two types of participation had hardly any relationship with other important components of the social capital construct, such as social trust and political trust. The latter result does not devalue the validity of the developed indices for informal and formal participation but suggests that participation and trust should be considered formative indicators of social capital.

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Notes

  1. More information about this program can be found on www.sqp.nl.

  2. For more detailed information, visit: www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital.

  3. Question C2 in the ESS1.

  4. For the ESS data we refer to the ESS website: www.europeansocialsurvey.org/.

  5. Questions E1 to E12 in the ESS1.

  6. Question C1 in the ESS1.

  7. Questions B7, B8 and B9 in the ESS1.

  8. Questions A8, A9 and A10 in the ESS1.

  9. Question F7 in the ESS1.

  10. Question F6 in the ESS1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INSEAD Global Leadership Centre, INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, 77305, Fontainebleau Cedex, France

    Laura Guillen

  2. Department of Economics, University of Girona, Campus Montilivi, 17071, Girona, Spain

    Lluis Coromina

  3. Research & Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Passeig de Circumval·lació, 8, 08003, Barcelona, Spain

    Willem E. Saris

Authors
  1. Laura Guillen
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  2. Lluis Coromina
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  3. Willem E. Saris
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laura Guillen.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Computation of Composite Score Quality

The quality for a composite score can be obtained following Saris and Gallhofer (2007):

$$ {\text{Quality}}\,{\text{of}}\,x = 1 - \left[ {{\frac{{\sum\limits_{i = 1}^{n} {\text{var} (e_{i} )} }}{{\text{var} (x)}}}} \right] $$
(7)

where var(e i ) is the error variance of the observed variable and var(x) is the variance for the composite score.

The variance of the measurement error for the observed variables, used in structural equation models to correct for measurement error, can be computed using the known values from quality and the variance of the observed variable as follows:

$$ (1 - quality)\text{var} (\text{var}_{i} ) $$
(8)

where var(var i ) is the variance of the observable variable.

Appendix 2: Operationalization of the Dependent Variables

2.1 Political Activities

The term ‘political activities’ refers to the extent of active participation in political affairs. More precisely, using the ESS questionnaire we can create a composite score, political activities, which represents a combination of conventional and protest actions. In the ESS this is measured by the sum of the participation in different activities. The only information requested is which actions are involved; frequency of activities is ignored.

Conventional forms of action in terms of political activism are measured by asking if the respondent has:

  • … contacted a politician, government or local government official

  • … worn or displayed a campaign badge/sticker

  • … donated money to a political organisation or group

Protest actions are measured by asking if the respondent has:

  • … signed a petition

  • … taken part in a lawful public demonstration

  • … boycotted certain products

  • … deliberately bought certain products for political, ethical or environmental reasons … participated in illegal protest activities

Based on these measures, ‘political activities’ can be defined as an unweighted summated scale, and operationalized as:

$$ PA_{j} = n_{cj} + n_{pj} $$

where \( n_{cj} \) = number of conventional actions; \( n_{pj} \) = number of protest actions.

For the new variable, Political Actions (PA), the quality can be obtained applying Eq. 7. Quality for PA is equal to .72 in the Netherlands, .64 in Great Britain and .726 in Germany.

2.2 Happiness or Subjective Well-Being

Happiness is measured in the ESS main questionnaire by the following questionFootnote 6: “Taking all these things together, how happy would you say you are?”

People are asked to express their opinion on an 11-point scale, from extremely unhappy (0) to extremely happy (10).

The quality for this question was estimated using Survey Quality Predictor (SQP) and the quality is .69 in the Netherlands, .74 in Great Britain and .66 in Germany. This result is used in the measurement part for assessing the quality of each indicator. This means that the error variance for this variables can be known from the equation (1 − Quality i )* variance i , where (i) refers to happiness.

2.3 Political Trust

ESS evaluates political trust by asking questions related to trust in institutions. The question is: “…on a score of 0–10 how much do you personally trust each of the institutions. 0 means you do not trust an institution at all, and 10 means you have complete trust.” Footnote 7

The items used are trust in the parliament of the specific country, trust in the legal system, and trust in the police. It is evaluated using an 11-point scale from “no trust at all” to “complete trust”.

The quality of the measures of political trust were obtained from a previous Multitrait Multimethod (MTMM) studies (Oberski and Saris, forthcoming) and the qualities for trust in the parliament are: .825 in the Netherlands, .765 in Great Britain and .791 in Germany. Qualities for trust in legal systems questions are: .882, .774 and 828, respectively, and qualities for trust in the police are: 921, .828 and .874, respectively.

If we are interested in a unique quality measure for political trust, we can obtain it from a composite score using Eq. 7. Then, the quality estimate for political trust is .939 in the Netherlands, .881 in Great Britain and .912 in Germany. In the model specification, the error variance for his variable can be known from the equation (1 − Quality i )* variance i , where (i) is each item.

2.4 Social Trust

Social trust in the ESS main questionnaire is measured by three items,Footnote 8 which examine to what extent people trust others:

  • “Using this card, generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people? “

  • “Do you think that most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance, or would they try to be fair?”

  • “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly looking out for themselves?”.

For these questions an 11-point scale was used from “less trusty” to “more trusty”.

A measure for quality can also be obtained for the three items for social trust. Firstly we estimated a confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modelling obtaining the measurement error for the three observed variables. From these estimates quality can be obtained by following Eq. 7. Qualities used for social trust are .740 in the Netherlands, .766 in Great Britain and .717 in Germany.

2.5 Background Variables

In our case, we use two indicators for the ‘education’ variable and one direct indicator for age. The indicators for education are years of full-time educationFootnote 9 (How many years of full-time education have you completed? [To be reported in full-time equivalents, including compulsory/mandatory years of schooling]) and the highest level of educationFootnote 10 (What is the highest level of education you have achieved ?) with a 5-point scale from 01 No qualifications; 02 CSE grade 2-5/GCSE grades D-G or equivalent; 03 CSE grade 1/O-level/GCSE grades A-C or equivalent; 04 A-level, AS-level or equivalent; 05 Degree/postgraduate qualification or equivalent.

Appendix 3

See Table 9.

Table 9 Complete results of the analysis of the model in Fig. 4
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Guillen, L., Coromina, L. & Saris, W.E. Measurement of Social Participation and its Place in Social Capital Theory. Soc Indic Res 100, 331–350 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9631-6

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