Once an organization has identified the social capital elements in its programs and specified pathways through which its activities contribute to social capital formation, it can formulate plans to evaluate its social capital impact. Somewhat artificially, we break down this process into steps 4 and 5: Step 4 involves the basic design questions, such as the study's timeframe and the choice of study populations; Step 5 concerns the nuts and bolts of fielding a survey-based evaluation. You can also access a list of social capital survey questions intended to help organizations develop their own survey instruments.

STEP 4: Designing the Evaluation

STEP 5: Conducting an Evaluation

Together with the earlier "Whom to Study?" discussion, the answers to these questions largely determine the overall evaluation cost. Of course, if the resulting cost is too high, an organization may have to scale back, compromising on these four issues until the project is affordable. At that point, the organization will have to ensure that the scaled-down evaluation will still be worthwhile.

INTERVIEW FORMATS (expand)

HOW MANY CASES? (expand)

MAKING SURE SAMPLES ARE RANDOM (AND NON-RESPONSE ERROR) (expand)

WHO SHOULD CONDUCT THE EVALUATION? (expand)

HOW TO CONSTRUCT THE QUESTIONNAIRE (collapse)

In "Recommended Survey Questions" we supply recommended core questions on social capital measurement and a longer list of pre-tested questions. [In general, you should use pre-tested survey questions, since new questions that sound good may not actually provide useful data.] We invite you to use as many of these questions as you want. Since, in your construction of a survey you want to nonetheless draft your own questions, especially on issues relating to the specifics of your program, we have a separate section on how-to's for survey construction. Note that writing questions is easiest when the survey writer has a good sense both of what she wants to measure and how to communicate with the study and comparison populations. You may want to read the section on "Determining Data Weighting" in advance of gathering the data.

Confidentiality
Because the evaluation design involves both before- and after-interviews, you will need to keep contact information to recontact survey respondents and both surveys will need respondent identifiers. Special efforts therefore must be made to protect respondent confidentiality. There are a number of ways in which this can be done during and after the study period and in the creation of computer data files.

A simple approach is to assign unique identifier numbers to each respondent that allow the organization to share the data with others or to join the data from different survey waves, without referencing respondent names. A separate file can be kept (with paper backup) that contains the mapping of names to respondent identifiers. We recommend that the survey instruments be numbered on all pages in advance and that the cover sheets only contain respondent's name, address, or other contact information. This page can then be easily separated from the rest of the questionnaire before being given to the organization.

Confidentiality is especially important to underscore, especially if the surveys are being conducted face-to-face or by phone with anyone from the organization. Where possible, we suggest that mail surveys be sent to some group other than the program being evaluated so the responses can be entered confidentially.

Congratulations! You're ready to go conduct the survey. Come back to Phase Three when you have gathered the results of the survey and are ready to input them.