How connected are Americans to each other?
• How many of your neighbors' first names do you know?
• How often do you attend parades or festivals?
• Do you volunteer at your kids' school? Or help out senior citizens?
• Do you trust your local police?
• Do you know who your U.S. senators are?
• Do you attend religious services? Or go to the theater?
• Do you sign petitions? Or attend neighborhood meetings?
• Do you think the people running your community care about you?
• Can you make a difference?
• How often do you visit with friends or family?

Background: Three dozen community foundations, other funders, and the Saguaro Seminar of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University joined together to ask these questions of nearly 30,000 people in the largest-ever survey on the civic engagement of Americans. In the survey, we look at how connected we are to family, friends, neighbors and civic institutions on a local and national level. These connections - our Social Capital - are the glue that hold us together and enable us to build bridges to others. This project will assist residents in each of our local communities as they work to build stronger communities and strengthen community bonds.

Short Form: The Saguaro Seminar has distilled down the 25-minute Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey into a Short Form that has 5-10 minutes of questions. We have the short form available in English and Spanish. We would appreciate an e-mail letting us know how you used the short-form, any recommendations to us, and what your results were.

Survey instrument: Here is the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey in English and Spanish. For the 2006 Social Capital Community Survey, click here.

Obtaining data: For researchers that want to use these Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey data for analysis, we have arranged to have the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (at the Univ. of Connecticut, at Storrs) make these data publicly available. You can access these data (in SPSS format), the codebook, and information about our survey methods at:
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/data/datasets/social_capital_community_survey.html

Papers using SCCBS survey: Here is a list of papers generated from these SCCBS data. If you know of other papers, please let us know

Social Capital Measurement Generally: Click here.