Social Capital, Community Resilience, and Wellbeing

Title: Social Capital, Community Resilience, and Wellbeing: A Secondary Analysis of the 2007 and 2009 Citizenship Survey

Funder(s): Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 

Start Date: TBC

End Date: TBC

Research Team

Wouter Poortinga, Cardiff University

Description

The proposed project will empirically explore the role of the social environment in building healthy and resilient communities, by expanding upon the bonding, bridging and linking framework of social capital (Szreter & Woolcock 2004) to identify the elements that are most successful in buffering against the detrimental effects of neighbourhood deprivation. The project involves an extensive literature review to bring together relevant theoretical and empirical research on the topics of (community) resilience, social capital and associated fields of research, and a comprehensive secondary analysis of the 2007 and 2009 Citizenship Survey. 

The Citizenship Survey is a biennial survey conducted since 2001 covering the adult population of England and Wales. It collects information on a wide variety of topics through face-to-face interviews of a regionally representative sample, utilising a multistage sampling strategy. The Citizenship Survey is an ideal dataset for the proposed project, as it contains various questions that can be used as indicators of bonding, bridging and linking social capital, a range of important associated social aspects of the neighbourhood environment, as well as the widely-used self-rated health measure and Welsh and English Indices of Deprivation. Both the 2007 and 2009 

The results of the proposed project will be of high public policy interest and provide high-quality long-term academic outputs. The project contributes to a better understanding of inequalities in health and how the social-environment may help to reduce these gaps through its contribution to community resilience.