THE JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCEMarch 2000Onyx, Bullen / MEASURING SOCI L CAPITAL Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities

This article develops an empirically grounded definition of social capital. Drawing on the work of Coleman and Putnam and others, the article discusses social capital in terms of participation in networks, reciprocity, trust, social norms, the commons, and social agency. Potential items to measure these elements were developed in an empirical study. A questionnaire containing 68 potential items was administered to approximately 1,200 adults in five Australian communities: two rural communities, two outer metropolitan areas, and one inner-city area of Sydney. The responses were subjected to extensive sta-tistical analysis involving a hierarchical factor analysis, which identified a single general underlying factor and eight orthogonal specific factors, accounting for 49 % of the vari-ance. Three of the specific factors identified were community participation, agency, and trust. The five communities differed significantly in terms of the general and specific factors. This article adds to current attempts to develop an empirically grounded definition of social capital. From the literature, it is possible to identify a number of proposed con-ceptual component elements that individually and together are believed to constitute social capital. From this analysis, a set of specific items were designed to provide a (partial) empirical test of the theoretical components of social capital. The theoretical implications of the empirical analysis are then explored