My colleague Thomas provided me with a brilliant link to a piece discussing the measurement of social capital. At first I was a bit skeptic because the author - who are the authors by the way? Who are behind gnudung.com? - keeps stressing the search for hard data to measure in the growing body of social capital theory. I was thinking to myself that maybe you’re asking the wrong questions if you persist on looking for hard data to answer your questions. Maybe you shouldn’t look for the amount of social capital, maybe you ought to look at the meaning of social capital…the meaning of trust, the meaning of reciprocity - what does those factors mean for a social network for instance over time? Later on I started to get down right disillusioned as the piece kept going on about quantitative methods and the hardship of measuring social capital quantitatively.
Well I know it’s all a matter of your perspective on scientific method, and my initial skepticism when reading the piece quickly vanished as I was once again soothed and reminded that Ideally, measures of social capital should be thouroughly based on, and tied to, the conceptual framework for the specific study. Basicly that means that the questions you ask has to guide your choice of method. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks, Thomas for the reference.