Engagement methods
Community profiling: social capital surveys
The US academic Robert Putnam brought the concept of "social capital" to international attention through his book "Bowling Alone" (1995) in which he describes the core building blocks of civic society and reasons for its decline.
www.bowlingalone.com/index.php3
The core concepts like social networks, trust, reciprocity, and collective action and activities have informed policy thinking on active citizenship, community cohesion, and other policy areas.
In the past five years, the concepts have been developed into survey measures aimed at capturing social capital and its components, to understand the well-being and social functioning of communities. These measures of social capital have found world-wide use:
http://poverty.worldbank.org/files/11998_WP18-Web.pdf
In the UK, social capital survey tools were piloted by OPM in 1997 in Salford, and were integrated in national surveys such as the 2000/1 General Household Survey, and the Home Office Active Communities Survey: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs/infindin.pdf
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