A mixed methods approach to measuring neighbourhood social capital: a case study in South East Queensland, Australia

This paper investigates how a mixed-methods approach to measuring social capital can be used in urban planning contexts to enhance best practice outcomes. Literature in the disciplines of social capital, health, participation, resilience and sustainable development suggest that strong social capital at the neighbourhood scale can increase community cohesion, trust, reciprocity, community capacity, civic participation and resilience. Exploring how bonding, bridging and linking social capital is expressed in a middle class coastal community on the Sunshine Coast, South East Queensland, Australia, a mixed methods approach to measuring social capital found that the benefits of qualitative methods in particular provided an in-depth and contextualised understanding of social capital at the neighbourhood unit of analysis. Further, social capital is a fluid construct, where growth in one dimension of social capital, such as bonding capital, can contribute to growth in bridging social capital, and vice versa. We contend that while social capital is often invoked in an urban planning context to identify socio-economic inequities, the social capital construct, and comprehensive measurement of same, holds far greater opportunities for planners and developers to foster social capital growth and to give direction to the potential priorities in a neighbourhood, relevant to the local residents and the local context