Concepts in the social sciences go in and out of fashion even more quickly than hairstyles. My first encounter with this phenomenon was as an undergraduate, when we were told in our first year to grapple with Althusser only to hear as third years that structuralism was “old hat”. The idea of social capital, which became extremely popular around the millenium, has now been around for over 20 years. Does it still have any continuing relevance today?
I need to start by declaring an interest. I wrote quite a bit about social capital, both on my own and with my colleague Tom Schuller, and ended up publishing a short text book on the concept. It is in its third edition and has now appeared in several languages, and is unique among my publications in generating any serious income from royalties. So I am pleased to announce that the concept appears to be alive and well, if not as popular across the social sciences as it was around the year 2000.
I’m basing this judgement on some very simple metrics from Google Trends. A straightforward search of all items shows that while global use of the term peaked in March 2004 (and therefore represents Google’s index point of 100), its use hovers around one quarter of that peak right through to the present.
Next I looked at use within the USA only. The use of the term has held up rather better among Americans than in the rest of the world, with most periods showing an average use rate of just under half its peak level of February 2004. Interestingly, Americans’ interest peaked again in Aril 2020, a spike that I reckon has to be linked to academic and public debates over social capital and the pandemic.
Far from disappearing, the concept of social capital seems to be thriving. Some people – myself included – continue to found it a fruitful way of highlighting the ways in which our social connections serve as a resource in ways which then have wider implications for our communities and for the organisations to which we belong.
Recently I posted a brief summary of research into social capital’s consequences for our current pandemic. We know much less, at this stage, about the way the pandemic, and particularly social distancing strategies, is reshaping people’s social ties. So here’s my attempt to summarise briefly what we do know; be warned that some of the evidence comes from snapshot survey findings and is therefore more limited than I’d like.
We certainly know that loneliness is seriously bad for one’s health, and I assume that social distancing on your own is a pretty lonely experience – possibly even a frightening one. Equally we know that mixing with family and friends is good for health and well-being, and presumably distancing can damage that. And studies of the SARS pandemic concluded that social isolation combined with extreme uncertainty had created severe psychological stress.
Some researchers, drawing on data from China, have linked isolating with anxiety, sleep disorders, and depression; similar findings are reported for Italy. It isn’t clear, at least to me, how far these patterns are a result of lockdown and the loss of social support systems, or are a consequence of fear of infection. Still, there clearly is a down side, with isolation depriving people of the social anchoring that they depend on.
Then there is the impact of the pandemic on fragile or exploitative social bonds. A number of countries report a rise in home-based violence (usually, but of course not always, male on female or adult on child). Whether we will also see a longer-term rise in family break-ups as a result of confinement combined with anxiety is yet to be seen.
And anecdotally, while most of us appear to be willing to protect the community by distancing, all of us have seen cases of selfishness bordering on crass stupidity, like cyclists and jogger insisting on exercising their overtaking rights in narrow footpaths. Is there also an up side?
One way to look at this is to focus on social media and our ties. While we might moan about Zoom meetings, they allow us to see and engage with workmates, family, and friends in a way that was unimaginable in past times. Yes, of course a virtual hug with grandad isn’t the same as the real thing, but it’s a hug; and many of us are becoming ever more adept at communicating in new ways.
Second, at least in the UK, there has been an upsurge in volunteering. Much of it is informal and unseen, from women sewing face masks to people phoning an elderly neighbour. One survey estimates that a fifth of UK adults have started volunteering in their community since the pandemic broke; two-thirds of all UK adults reported that their community was stronger as a result of the pandemic. Mutual aid groups have sprung up across the country, and are increasingly linked together as a movement.
Third, there have been highly visible symbolic expressions of mutual solidarity. The best example was the weekly public applause for key workers, which in our street was led by an increasingly proficient piper playing Highland Cathedral. Some of my Facebook friends sneered at the people who came out to applaud, but not one of them is a nurse, hospital porter, bin collector, care assistant, soldier, or delivery driver.
Public solidarity with low-paid and largely disregarded workers is a rarity, and not something I can view with contempt. And certainly in our case, lockdown has seen increased interaction with neighbours, whether in the aftermath of the Thursday applause or in the form of book exchanges, distanced coffee mornings, or chatting among wild garlic gatherers.
Like other forms of social capital, symbolic solidarity has consequences: recent survey data show a massive rise in the number of key workers who say they feel appreciated by the public. This is a body of goodwill that needs to be nurtured if it is to be sustained.
And then there is the converse: public contempt in the UK is largely reserved from those who break the lockdown. A particular fury greets public leadership figures who ignore the rules that they themselves have made. While the Scottish government seems to have got away unscathed with its botched (or worse) handling of its hypocritical Chief Medical Officer’s behaviour, the UK government’s handling of the Cummings scandal seems to have cost it dearly: trust in government information fell sharply in its wake, among people of all political persuasions and none. On the other hand, the communal solidarity of people who have observed the rules for those who seek optouts has been deeply impressive.
One conclusion I draw from the research studies is that our online behaviour is providing social scientists and others with an awful lot of valuable data. These raises ethical issues which will be familiar to many of those who use data from social media and mobile device records.
But my wider conclusion is that the pandemic really is reshaping our social bonds. The early signs suggest trends that might simply be short term responses to particular circumstances. However, while lockdowns may come and go, social distancing will be around for some time. If so, it likely will have longer term effects on our behaviours which will include our interactions with others. My expectation is that there will be some negative impats on social capital and some positive, but at least as important will be some deep-rooted changes in the ways that social bonds are made, reinforced, and broken.
Usually one of the most crowded streets in the resort town of Whitby
I have a long-standing interest in social capital – that’s to say, the many different ways in which our social ties can serve as a resource. So the pandemic, and the common policy of social distancing as a way of reducing infections, raises some obvious issues. In particular, I’ve wondered about some simple but big questions.
How do our social ties affect our experiences of social distancing, and of the wider pandemic?
What effect is social distancing having on our social ties, and indeed on their value?
In the longer term, what is the role of social capital in recovery from Covid-19?
This post looks at the first of these questions; I’ll look at the others in the next couple of days. And given that social researchers have access to much pre-existing data, as well as some new data on the pandemic, it’s not surprsing that some research has already emerged, thouigh I am guessing that much of it has yet to be peer-reviewed.
All I can do here is offer a few examples of studies that seem to me robust enough to command attention; as a crude headline, the findings seem so far to be consistent with the view that social capital still matters, even in the midst of a global pandemic.
One study of two ‘hot spots’ in Italy and New York State points to evidence that online social ties are associated with the spread of the disease. Conversely, access to mediated social ties may help inhibit the disease: according to an analysis based on US data, while income level appears to be the main factor in explaining social distancing – with the rich more likely to distance than the poor – access to high-speed internet access also matters.
While distancing appears to be affected by trust in the media, it is also associated with political specific forms of media consumption, and by political cultures. In the USA, it seems that viewing Fox News reduced the propensity to stay at home. Meanwhile, according to another paper, areas that vote Republican stayed at home less than those which voted Democrat.
Another study slightly took me aback, this time on distancing and ethnicity. Drawing on data from Russia and the USA, the researchers found that people who lived in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods are more likely to observe distancing rules than those in more homogeneous areas. This finding is consistent with the broader literature on diversity, which tends to find that we are more likely to form ties with, and trust, people who are most like ourselves.
So, as in other areas of public health, social capital is something to be taken seriously, and it follows that policies which promote it can help slow the spread of infection. Conversely, policies which reduce social capital, and undermine its foundations, pose a risk to successful recovery from the pandemic. And policies which build bridges between people with different identities – political, cultural, ethnic, national -may be particularly important in the longer term.
I’ve long been interested in social capital – a concept that draws attention to the complex ways in which our social connections serve as a resource. For the third edition of my short book on the subject I added a section on loneliness, which I saw as a neglected aspect of social capital, as it demonstrates the negative effects of having too few – or too weak – connections with others.
Since then, debate over loneliness has attracted widespread attention. This week’s edition of the Lancet carries a strongly worded editorial on the subject, triggered by a new and authoritative report on the risks and costs – social as well as financial – of loneliness. As we move towards policies of ‘social distancing’ in response to Covid-19, I thought it well worth sharing.
Steven Johnson’s book on decision-making is a lively read, and full of good ideas for helping you decide things. What attracted my attention, though, was its relevance to the social capital debate.
Most of us prefer to hang around with people who are much like ourselves. We like neighbourhoods full of people who are similar to ourselves, we get intimate with people like us, and we join clubs and interest groups of like-minded people. It also happens that we inevitably end up spending most time with people not just with shared interests, but also of similar ethnicities, faiths, socio-economic background, cultural assumptions, and life experiences.
This ‘principle of homophily’ is well known in the social capital literature, and it can indeed help make life easier and more pleasurable much of the time. But according to Johnson, it also makes our decision-making capacities more vulnerable. He believes that the greater the diversity of those involved, the better our decisions. This is because people with varying backgrounds and assumptions will challenge and question each other, rather than simply going with the flow.
So a wider range of participants from different backgrounds is not just a matter of fairness; it also leads us to make better decisions. This is consistent with social capital research which shows a number of advantages to heterogeneous networks: as in the well-known case of job opportunities, to take one example, they are better than tight networks of folk like us for exposing us to information and ideas that we might otherwise miss /or overlook.
I agree with most but not all of Johnson’s analysis of networks and decision-making. First, for some purposes it is best to have access to a tight networks of people like us. To give one example, if you need a loan to start your new business, family and close friends are more likely to help than people you don’t know so well. More controversially, some research shows that pupils perform better academically when taught by members of the same ethnic group or gender.
So we appear to need a balance of heterogeneity and homogeneity to provide a mix of different resources to see us through our lives. Mixing only with people like yourself is a sure fire way of limiting your options; mixing only with loose ties is to cut yourself off from dependable and secure relationships.
Second, Johnson doesn’t discuss the policy implications of his thinking (though he does have interesting things to say about fiction and decision-making). He doesn’t look at organised attempts to bring large numbers of different people together to deliberate on agreed solutions to shared problems, such as citizens’ juries or other moderated large scale debates.
When they work, as in some types of community planning, they are great; when they become shouty (eg the two sides of Brexit) they just make matters worse. In short, how can we best improve public decision-making capacity through organised diversity?
Preparing the latest edition of my textbook on social capital, I became particularly interested in the way that social media are shaping our social connections. Judging by the research available, social media play a complex role in which they sometimes complement and sometimes compete with face to face relationships. And sometimes they mirror each other.
One way in which social media mirror face to face interaction is a tendency towards homophily. Most people like to follow others on social media who are broadly similar to themselves – just as they do in other social interactions. Yet the main benefit of social media is the opportunity they provide for interacting with those who are very different from yourself. And if you think that being challenged by different perspectives is beneficial, as I do, then you try to build social media networks that are broad and diverse.
And I thought that was what I had done. During the Scottish referendum I managed to get attacked by Tweeps from both sides; I follow UKIPPERs, Corbynistas, Remainers, Welsh Nats, Lib Dems, some Tories and a Cornish independence campaigner; I follow people from different countries and speakers of four European languages. Some even follow golf and motor racing, which I hate with a vengeance. I don’t think I follow any racists, and certainly none who are overt, but I do follow some people who think all whites are at best deeply inclined towards racism. So it’s hardly an echo chamber – but clearly I’ve been too smug by half.
The new Doctor Who
Today I woke up to aTwitter storm over the new Doctor Who. The long running BBC series will now be led by a woman, played by the wonderful Jodie Whittaker, and my timeline was full of people protesting vociferously against others who had complained about the role going to a woman. But not a single tweet appeared from the protesters, not a single one.
Now it is possible that actually hardly anyone is really upset by a female Doctor. This is hardly radical casting: we’ve had feminist sci-fi for decades – why would one more female lead bother anyone? I can imagine that one or two of the usual rent-a-pen journalists might perform anger in order to generate a bit of click bait for their employer (I’m not going to name them, because that is what they want). But perhaps they are on their own this time.
Or perhaps I’ve stumbled across the boundaries of my own social media bubble. And even this bubble reflects face-to-face bonds, because I realise that I don’t actually know anyone who watches or even cares a fart about Doctor Who. On reflection, though, I am inclined to return to my smug default setting: what Twitter has done is connect me with a community that was previously unknown to me. How diverse is that?
Loneliness poses an enormous challenge to those experiencing it, and in our society it seems particularly prevalent among older adults. It is easy to understand why this might be so: on the one hand death and physical decline rob us of our friends, and on the other our society has become more individualised and fluid so that making new friends is harder. The question then is what should be done.
This issue came up clearly at a conference I am currently attending on Transitions in the Life Course. It was organised by an impressive new doctoral school called Doing Transitions at the Universities of Frankfurt and Tübingen, and I will blog more about the conference and its background in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I wanted to report back on a paper that impressed me, by Nan Stevens, a researcher on loneliness in later life.
Stevens started by outlining the positive benefits of friendship networks for older people undertaking transitions, before moving on to explore issues of loneliness in social networks. She then asked whether it is possible to improve friendships in later life, and then reported on the effects of a particular friendship enrichment programme for older women.
Based on feminist therapy and reevaluation counseling, the programme comprises 12 weekly lessons focussing on self-esteem, relational competence, and friendship formation and maintenance, as well as the practice of relevant social skills. Stevens’ studies are available online, so all I will say here is that (a) she has reasonably good evidence for their effectiveness for those who participated and (b) I encourage you to read them for yourself.
I did wonder, though, whether much the same impact could be achieved by promoting self-help educational programmes that do not focus on friendship per se, but instead pursue the interests of older adults themselves. By the time people reach later life they are often sick of being told what they need to learn by other people, and one reason why the Universities of the Third Age and Men’s Sheds movements are so popular is that they consist of people doing their own thing.
For me, the issue then is how we go beyond the existing constituencies of these self-help forms of adult education, and engage those in later life who are simply not attracted to the U3A or Men’s Sheds. Although I tried exploring this in my book on social capital, I’m still not really certain what the best way of doing this is. Given the benefits of friendship and the penalties of loneliness, extending the reach of learning opportunities for older adults does seem to me an important part of the policy toolkit.
Living in Cologne didn’t exactly at put me the centre of the rugby world, but I found it easy enough to satisfy my cravings. Six Nations matches were shown in several bars (none of which were worth visiting on any other grounds) and at the local clubhouse of ASV Köln. And I also watched ASV Köln, not that my support them much good: they finished bottom of the 2. Bundesliga West. In fact, in recent years the men’s team has done rather poorly, while the women’s team has been relatively successful.
Cologne’s Rugby United participants
Last week, though, ASV Köln won a prize. Three women players launched a project last year under the name of Rugby United with the aim of exploiting rugby’s reliance on team building to bring people together, and foster what they described as the game’s ‘central values’ of ‘Disziplin, Respekt und Fairplay’. They also used what in Germany is called ‘the third forty minutes’, and in the UK is an opportunity for a pint, as a time for discussion and interaction.
The project took time to get under way. Unsurprisingly, the idea of rugby itself isn’t exactly familiar to many people living in the refugee hostels (which range from old barracks to sports halls), let alone rugby involving girls as well as boys. The project’s supporters have to raise money for playing kit, and for the shared meal after sessions.
Thirty people, between the ages of 3 and 46, turned up to the first training session. The project’s mid-term goal is to integrate the refugees gradually into the standard club training sessions, with a view to eventually recruiting the best players into ASV’s teams. The prospects look reasonably good, with 20-30 refugees turning up to sessions. And as well as attracting the attention of the city’s mayor and sporting community locally, three of the younger refugees were selected as mascots for the German national side.
I have no idea what Cologne’s wider refugee communities make of this development. Parents must be slightly bothered when their children come home with bumps and bruises and tales of on-pitch arguments, and I imagine that not all communities welcome the very idea of women’s rugby. On the other hand, children’s lives in the refugee homes can be mind-numbingly boring, with few facilities and a high turnover of social work staff. And as in many German towns and cities, the rugby club is part of a wider sporting association – in this case Athletik Sportverein Köln – with a history of community engagement (including participation in Cologne’s gay pride celebrations).
Of course this is a relatively small project. With the best will in the world, an amateur rugby club cannot involve more than a handful of the estimated 12,000 refugees living in Cologne. And you could argue that the recruitment of potential players, along with the accompanying publicity, is very much in ASV’s interests (interestingly, some village soccer clubs in Germany are able to field a team mainly thanks to their connections with refugee communities).
All the same, hats off to the Athletik Sportverein Köln, and high respect to the three players who made this project possible. And to the rest of the rugby community, especially in the cash-rich Six Nations: more of the same, please. Meanwhile, I wish ASV Köln Rugby every success this season, on and off the pitch.
I’ve long seen loneliness as a neglected dimension in the social capital debate.A furry of recent media reports about loneliness and the young, as well as loneliness and the elderly, has made me revisit this issue
At its simplest, the example of loneliness and its damaging effects always seems to me a good reason for ignoring those who say social capital is not worth researching. If loneliness can be so harmful, it follows that decent social connections are a positive resource, at least potentially. So I’ve often wondered why social capital researchers don’t at present have much to say on the topic.
I tried to remedy this in a little way in my social capital textbook. The final chapter considers policy interventions in the area of social capital, and in the third edition I introduced a few ideas about tackling loneliness. Like any intervention in social capital, there are risks and problems, but not acting to prevent loneliness is also an intervention – and one with damaging consequences.
My own view is that thinking of loneliness in the context of social capital is helpful, but you can make up your own mind about that.
From Social Capital (p 84)
It’s worth adding that fostering public debate over loneliness in itself makes a valuable contribution. I’ve been impressed by the Yorkshire Post‘s long-running campaign over loneliness, for example. Simply hiding the problem is, it seems to me, a recipe for making things much worse.
Having a decent social network is usually a really good thing, both for you and for the communities to which you belong. Conversely, loneliness and isolation can be seriously harmful to your health and well-being, as well as damaging to your communities’ attempts to cooperate.
In revising my introductory textbook for its latest edition I concluded that the literature on the health benefits of social capital is now well-established and reasonably conclusive. However, as I also emphasised, different forms of social capital can have different consequences for different parts of the population. And just as the book went to press, along came a new study which made this point nicely.
The study was led by Sara Ferlander, from the Stockholm Centre for Health and Social Change, and drew on data collected in the Moscow Health Survey. You can read their paper, which is available on open access here. I will therefore focus in this post on the findings that particularly interested me.
First, as with a number of other studies, the survey found that women were more likely than men to report that they suffer from depression. They were also more likely to say that they suffer from severe depression. The authors then used a statistical technique called regression analysis to try to determine how other factors, including social networks, were connected to depression; they found that while education and age showed little connection, money problems and depression did go together.
Other studies, summarised in my book, have shown that social networks generally help act as a buffer against depression. The reasons might seem obvious: having someone to turn to in times of trouble isn’t just a way of overcoming practical problems, but is also reassuring to your sense of self and worth to others. But Moscow survey findings show a degree of complexity.
Women who were divorced or widowed, all other things being even, had higher odds of reporting depression. This is broadly what social capital theory leads us to expect, and the Ferlander team concluded that this form of social capital has particular importance for women.
More unexpectedly, the study found no association for either men or women between self-reported depression and either membership of voluntary groups or contacts with friends. And for women, it found that those with fewer age-bridging connections were less likely to report depression than those whose social ties were richer in age-diverse connections. The researchers suggest that this might be explained partly by sharp inter-generational tensions in Russian society and gender discrimination in the workplace.
The obvious question is whether we would find similar patterns elsewhere. Given Russia’s particular social and economic history, it’s likely that there are distinctive factors at work in the well-being of both women and men. Nevertheless, this study nicely illustrates the ways in which social capital somtimes works differently for women and men, and I wish I’d had access to it before the book went to press!
thelearningprofessor 