iContent Robot…

Here’s an account of how I use the social web to advance socialmarkets…

The Social Market project might just be the most important initiative in the non-profit world in the last thirty years. I know I want to be involved.

We’re answering Trent Stamp’s comments about socialmarkets on our blog….

I think the idea of social markets is an important one, but would I be wrong to say that your website is essentially vague and backed by a vision, which ie essentially an ideology? That sounds awfully critical, and I don’t really mean that because I’m interested in some of the same issues your site writes about.

One of things your site talks about first is social capital and that’s what set lights blinking for me. How do you measure social capital? I’m not being picky here. As I read the literature I think social capital as it is used is essentially a metaphor and that in all cases I’ve looked at it ends up being vague if you ask, for example, whether the downtown section of Waltham is “high” in social capital.

I put this issue this way (in terms of Waltham) because one of the efforts I’ve looked at that attempts to use social capital as an independent variable to measure other outcomes is Sampson’s work on how Chicago neighborhoods predict health outcomes. He claims neighborhoods high in social capital score better on heath measures. But when I’ve tried to determine what his survey research actually measures, I can’t find direct, individual-level questions. (To be fair, I’ve been talking to one of his colleagues in Chicago, Nancy Stein, who says she has them.)

This is important to me because I’m trying to find a way of measuring the extent of social capital (and also of community efficacy) in Central Pennsylvania towns. I think we’ll be able to do it eventually, but at present I can’t find anyone who has a sufficiently focused and detailed idea of what social capital is and how it works to be able to measure it using survey questions. We need this kind of individual level data, I think, to be able to link it to health outcomes and other individual-level measures.

My instincts and my sociology background tells me that social capital is probably a collective variable (like “community” in Durkheim’s study of suicide). But our preliminary Central PA studies suggest that the community level (or, say, the Zip Code level) is not very helpful because individuals who are linked into social capital systems may not be geographically close to their interaction partners. Or geographical communities may be so heterogeneous that one person’s social capital is canceled out by his neighbor’s lack.

I think Sampson working in Chicago might have been blessed by racism. That is to say, because segregation is striking in Chicago and large populations are affected, he could aggregate large populations of socially similar people. This allows him to demonstrate weak social effects that are hard to find in smaller, more heterogeneous populations.

Which gets me back to your website. I don’t see how you’re going to measure your key qualities of social capital and the social effects of things like homelessness. That’s not to say you can’t do it, and your site acknoledges that doing so is hard but you want to keep trying.

I think to be effective your site has to give some hint of how you think you’ll achieve this feat of measurement. It does not do that at present and this is why it seems ideological to me.

Carl Milofsky

1. Who are we
2. Who do we serve
3. Where do we serve
4. What vital, critical, urgent human need do we meet
5. How, in essence, do we “do” that?
6. How do we do this differently than anyone else addressing the same
need
7. Why are we deserving of your support