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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

Measurement of Social Participation and its place in Social Capital Theory

Session: Measurement of Social Capital

Authors:

Laura Guillén; INSEAD, France
Lluís Coromina; University of Girona, Spain
Willem E. Saris; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Abstract:

In social capital theory social participation plays an important role. A lot of questions concerning social participation have been asked in the first round of the European Social Survey. In this study we tried to develop an optimal measure for social participation based on these questions. However, in doing so we detected that a distinction has to be made between informal and formal participation because these two variables have different relationships with other variables like age, education, political action and happiness. It has also been found that these two participation variables had hardly any relationship with other important variables from the social capital theory such as social trust and political trust. The latter result does not devaluate the validity of the developed indices for informal and formal participation but suggest that these important components of social capital should be seen as formative indicators for social capital.