Development and validation of an instrument to measure social capital in disadvantaged neighborhoods

BACKGROUND: Building social capital within communities is an integrated element and outcome of the Supersetting approach, but knowledge on how to measure it within a disadvantaged urban context remain scarce. THE OBJECTIVE: To develop, test, and validate a questionnaire-based instrument to measure social capital among adult citizens living in a disadvantaged neighborhood. The study is done in Tingbjerg - a disadvantageous urban neighborhood. METHODS/THEORY: The development of the instrument is based on the social cohesion approach from within the theory of social capital and takes place in three phases. 1) Development including specification of a theoretical model of structural and cognitive social capital with indicators, development of items, and content validity of the items by experts. 2) Testing of developed items including face validity by conducting individual and focus groups interviews with Tingbjerg residents, translation into five languages and subsequent data collection among all 2567 adults living in Tingbjerg. 3) Statistical evaluation to test for dimensionality, reliability and validity. In case of suboptimal performance of the instrument, modifications may be applied, and the updated instrument re-evaluated. FINDINGS: Evaluations obtained from experts and residents will be analyzed and used to reduce and modify items included in the instrument. The questionnaire's dimensional structure will be explored with confirmatory factor analysis and its reliability with Cronbach alpha. Convergent validity will be tested through testing the association between social capital and a construct of social relations. Concurrent validity will be tested through testing the association between social capital and measures of self-assessed health and life quality. CONCLUSIONS: An instrument to measure social capital in disadvantaged neighborhood will be presented at the conference. Recommendation of the instrument will depend on the evaluation of the study findings.