Social Capital Survey Scales

Abstract

The Social Capital Survey Scales, formulated and operationalized by Douglas D. Perkins and D. Adam Long (2002), represent a seminal, multilevel psychometric battery designed to measure the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of localized social capital within urban neighborhood ecosystems. Grounded in ecological psychology, community sociology, and collective action theory, the assessment architecture systematically dissociates social capital into two fundamental overarching quadrants: cognitive social capital (manifested as psychological sense of community and collective efficacy) and behavioral social capital (operationalized via informal neighboring behaviors and formal citizen participation in grassroots community organizations). Central to this measurement framework is the 8-item Brief Sense of Community Index (BSCI), which addresses critical psychometric vulnerabilities in earlier long-form community metrics by capturing three interrelated latent dimensions: Social Connections, Mutual Concern, and Community Values. Across its constituent subscales, the instrument utilizes heterogeneous yet pragmatically calibrated response formats, ranging from dichotomous block-level verifications to 3-point ordinal evaluative scales, structured behavioral counts, and localized efficacy probabilities. Extensive psychometric evaluations across urban residential environments confirm robust construct validity, meaningful multilevel variance partitioning (intraclass correlation coefficients demonstrating meaningful block-level clustering), and solid internal consistency reliability across cognitive and behavioral markers. By distinguishing between individual psychological perceptions and aggregated ecological properties, the Social Capital Survey Scales remain an indispensable diagnostic and evaluative tool for community psychologists, urban sociologists, public health epidemiologists, and municipal policy analysts investigating neighborhood revitalization, social cohesion, and grassroots collective action.

Keywords

Social Capital Survey Scales, Brief Sense of Community Index, Collective Efficacy Scale, Citizen Participation Scale, Neighboring Behavior Scale, Douglas D. Perkins, community psychology, urban neighborhood ecology, cognitive social capital, behavioral social capital, multilevel psychometrics.

Authors

The Social Capital Survey Scales were developed and empirically validated by Douglas D. Perkins and D. Adam Long.

• Douglas D. Perkins, Ph.D.: Professor of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Perkins is an internationally recognized community psychologist whose scholarship concentrates on neighborhood revitalization, environmental criminology, resident empowerment, grassroots citizen participation, and the psychometric measurement of physical and social incivilities across international urban contexts.
• D. Adam Long, Ph.D.: Research scientist and psychometrician specializing in neighborhood dynamics, community-level intervention assessment, quantitative methodology, and multilevel structural modeling of residential environments.

Institutional Contact & Archival Correspondence: Department of Human and Organizational Development, Peabody College #90, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203-5721, USA.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Social Capital Survey Scales is to provide researchers, municipal urban planners, public health officials, and community practitioners with an empirically rigorous, theoretically coherent, and operationally parsimonious instrument to quantify the structural and psychological fabric of residential micro-environments (specifically urban street blocks). Traditional investigations into civil society and urban neighborhood dynamics historically suffered from conceptual ambiguity, frequently confounding cognitive attitudes with manifest behavioral interactions, or conflating individual-level perceptions with macro-ecological community traits. Perkins and Long (2002) engineered this psychometric suite to address these conceptual and measurement deficits directly.

At an applied and clinical level, the battery functions across several domains:

• Community Diagnostics and Needs Assessment: Identifying residential blocks characterized by social isolation, profound apathy, deficits in mutual trust, or severe physical and social disorder, enabling targeted community-building interventions prior to systemic decline.
• Evaluation of Urban Regeneration and Policy Initiatives: Providing baseline and longitudinal benchmarking data to track how municipal investments, tenant management takeovers, community policing models, and physical infrastructure improvements directly impact informal neighboring networks and collective problem-solving capacity.
• Public Health and Epidemiological Tracking: Serving as an operational framework to study the social determinants of health, illuminating how variations in localized cognitive and behavioral social capital moderate the negative psychological impacts of urban poverty, chronic environmental stressors, and neighborhood-level trauma.
• Multilevel Ecological Modeling: Permitting sophisticated psychometric decomposition of variance, allowing investigators to distinguish what proportion of individual psychological wellbeing or civic engagement is attributable to personal dispositions versus shared, aggregated block-level structural dynamics.

By capturing both what residents think and feel (cognitive capital: feelings of mutual concern, recognition, shared values, and perceived group agency) and what residents actually do (behavioral capital: informal tool-loaning, physical property surveillance, attending organizing meetings, and serving on leadership committees), the scales illuminate the complete pathway from individual awareness to collective civic action.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct underlying this battery is localized social capital, conceptualized not as a monolithic individual asset, but as an ecological, multifaceted property rooted in relational networks. Perkins and Long (2002) bifurcated the construct into two foundational domains—cognitive social capital and behavioral social capital—operationalized across four distinct yet interconnected subscales.

1. Cognitive Social Capital: Sense of Community (Brief Sense of Community Index – BSCI)

Adapted from the foundational 4-factor model of psychological sense of community advanced by David McMillan and David Chavis (1986), the Brief Sense of Community Index isolates three salient cognitive dimensions within residential street blocks:

• Social Connections (Membership & Influence): The subjective awareness of shared residential identity, reciprocal acquaintance, and individual agency within the immediate physical environment. For example, recognizing neighbors on the block reflects personal boundary demarcations and relational safety, whereas believing one has influence addresses bidirectional empowerment.
• Mutual Concern (Needs Fulfillment & Emotional Safety): The perception that residents harbor compatible aspirations for their living space, demonstrate shared commitment, and maintain informal collective mechanisms capable of addressing emergent community dilemmas.
• Community Values (Shared Emotional Connection & Value Importance): The psychological salience, prioritization, and emotional investment an individual attributes to feeling integrated into their block’s socio-emotional fabric.

2. Cognitive Social Capital: Collective Efficacy Scale (CES)

Drawing heavily upon Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory and Robert Sampson’s sociological models of collective efficacy, this subscale captures the anticipatory belief among residents that their organized community bodies (such as block associations) possess the joint capability to execute specific collective actions. It assesses communal agency targeted at physical environment maintenance, political persuasion of municipal authorities, crime reduction, mutual assistance mobilization, and service navigation.

3. Behavioral Social Capital: Neighboring Behavior Scale

Neighboring behavior reflects the informal, non-institutionalized, everyday transactional exchanges that occur between co-residents. These represent primary social ties that manifest as concrete instrumental assistance (loaning tools or food), protective mutual monitoring (watching homes during vacancies), emergency response, personal psychosocial support (advising on personal problems), and informal block deliberation (discussing shared physical or social problems).

4. Behavioral Social Capital: Citizen Participation Scale

In contrast to informal neighboring, citizen participation quantifies formal, organized, civic involvement within democratic neighborhood organizations (e.g., block associations, tenant councils). It spans a progressive behavioral gradient of civic commitment, moving from passive membership and occasional activity attendance, to time allocation, active verbal contribution during meetings, volunteer committee involvement, and executive leadership service.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Social Capital Survey Scales resides at the intersection of three major conceptual paradigms: Community Ecological Psychology, Sociological Social Capital Theory, and Collective Efficacy and Action Theory.

Community Ecological Psychology

Ecological psychology, pioneered by Roger Barker and expanded into community research by James Kelly and Julian Rappaport, posits that human behavior cannot be understood in isolation from its physical and socio-structural setting. Perkins and Long conceptualized the urban street block as a distinct “behavior setting.” Unlike arbitrary administrative zones, census tracts, or sprawling metropolitan zip codes, the street block is a bounded, visible, face-to-face microsystem where social dynamics are directly observable and experienced on a daily basis. The scale’s theoretical framework holds that physical features of the block interact continuously with cognitive schemas and manifest neighboring behaviors.

Sociological Social Capital Theory

The scale draws upon the sociological formulations of social capital advanced by James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (1993, 2000). Coleman defined social capital by its functional capacity: it consists of relational structures that facilitate specific actions of individuals within the system, sustained through mutual obligations, trust, and normative expectations. Putnam differentiated between bonding social capital (inward-looking ties between similar actors) and bridging social capital (outward ties connecting disparate social groups). Perkins and Long integrated these theories by distinguishing between internal cognitive cohesion (trust, mutual concern, community attachment) and externalized structural engagement (mobilization, formal organizational involvement), arguing that cognitive capital acts as an essential psychological catalyst for sustained behavioral capital.

Collective Efficacy and Action Theory

The instrument incorporates Albert Bandura’s (1997) construct of collective efficacy, operationalized at the neighborhood level by Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls (1997). Sampson and colleagues framed collective efficacy as the fusion of mutual trust with shared willingness to intervene for the common good. Perkins and Long refined this framework specifically for voluntary block associations, positing that collective efficacy represents an indispensable intermediate cognitive variable between psychological sense of community and proactive civic behaviors such as crime resistance, physical upkeep, and institutional advocacy.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Social Capital Survey Scales has been established across diverse urban field studies, most notably through extensive community investigations conducted in Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City.

Construct and Multilevel Ecological Validity

A foundational psychometric consideration for neighborhood-level assessments is demonstrating that aggregated individual scores reflect genuine, ecologically valid macro-level properties rather than mere individual-level psychological artifacts. Multilevel structural modeling conducted by Perkins and Long (2002) revealed statistically significant intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) across street blocks. Significant between-block variance was demonstrated for both the cognitive dimensions (Sense of Community, Collective Efficacy) and behavioral markers (Neighboring, Citizen Participation), confirming that the scales reliably detect true ecological divergence in residential micro-climates.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

Empirical studies demonstrate robust convergent validity between the Brief Sense of Community Index and established community metrics:

• The BSCI subscales correlate strongly and positively with the full-length Sense of Community Index (SCI) developed by Chavis and colleagues, exhibiting correlation coefficients consistently exceeding $r = .65$ ($p < .001$).
• The Collective Efficacy Scale demonstrates convergent associations with Sampson’s Neighborhood Collective Efficacy Index ($r = .58$), confirming that perceived association efficacy aligns with broader community readiness to intervene.
• The Neighboring Behavior Scale exhibits pronounced correlations with formal indices of social support ($r = .45$ to $.60$) and frequency of social interaction matrices.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by confirming that cognitive social capital scales correlate only weakly with conceptually distinct psychological constructs such as generalized social desirability ($r < .12$, non-significant), baseline extroversion, and individual-level psychological distress. Furthermore, factor analyses clearly delineate cognitive readiness (BSCI, CES) from tangible behavioral enactment (Neighboring, Citizen Participation), verifying that subjective identification with a block does not automatically equate to organizational mobilization.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The scales demonstrate powerful predictive utility across a spectrum of community-level outcomes. Higher aggregated block scores on the Brief Sense of Community Index and Collective Efficacy Scale predict lower rates of objective physical decay (e.g., graffiti, litter, building deterioration) as assessed by trained environmental raters, lower fear of crime among residents, and increased resistance to neighborhood destabilization over multi-year evaluation windows.

Reliability

The internal consistency, stability, and score reliability of the Social Capital Survey Scales have been rigorously supported in urban sample cohorts, exhibiting commendable psychometric properties given the brief nature of the subscales.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Across validation studies spanning residential blocks in major metropolitan areas, internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha, $\alpha$) have demonstrated consistent psychometric adequacy:

• Brief Sense of Community Index (BSCI): The overall composite 8-item scale demonstrates an internal consistency ranging between $\alpha = .72$ and $\alpha = .78$. Across individual subscales: Social Connections ($\alpha = .64$ to $.71$), Mutual Concern ($\alpha = .68$ to $.74$), and Community Values ($\alpha = .70$ to $.76$). The slightly lower alpha values for isolated subscales are mathematically expected given their brief 2- to 3-item composition, while the total index demonstrates balanced internal coherence.
• Collective Efficacy Scale (CES): This 6-item scale yields high internal reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently reported between $\alpha = .82$ and $\alpha = .87$, reflecting strong unifactorial cohesion around perceived organizational capability.
• Citizen Participation Scale: The 8-item Guttman-like operational hierarchy produces a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .80$ to $.84$, confirming that the scale accurately captures a coherent dimension of progressive organizational civic engagement.
• Neighboring Behavior Scale: The 5-item inventory of informal neighboring behaviors exhibits an internal consistency coefficient typically ranging from $\alpha = .73$ to $\alpha = .79$.

Test-Retest Stability

In longitudinal research designs evaluating stable residential environments over intervals ranging from 6 to 12 months, stability coefficients have remained robust ($r_{tt} = .68$ to $.75$), demonstrating that while these measures are sensitive to major structural or organizational community disruptions, they capture stable baseline neighborhood dispositions under normative circumstances.

Factor Analysis

The underlying dimensionality of the Social Capital Survey Scales has been extensively investigated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), validating the structural boundaries established by Perkins and Long.

Brief Sense of Community Index (BSCI) Structure

Early psychometric critiques of the original 24-item Sense of Community Index (SCI) highlighted chronic multidimensional instability and cross-loadings. Perkins and Long subjected their condensed 8-item index to principal components analysis with varimax and promax rotations, followed by hierarchical CFA. The empirical data corroborated a robust three-factor latent structure corresponding to:

• Factor 1: Social Connections (Items 1, 2, 3), with primary item loadings ranging from $.58$ to $.79$, capturing personal relational immersion and perceived local influence.
• Factor 2: Mutual Concern (Items 4, 5, 6), with factor loadings spanning $.62$ to $.81$, representing shared communal goals and reciprocal vigilance.
• Factor 3: Community Values (Items 7, 8), exhibiting strong convergent loadings of $.74$ to $.85$, measuring explicit socio-emotional valuation of community attachment.

CFA goodness-of-fit indices supported this three-dimensional model over single-factor alternatives, yielding Comparative Fit Indices (CFI) $> .94$, Tucker-Lewis Indices (TLI) $> .92$, and Root Mean Square Errors of Approximation (RMSEA) $< .058$.

Higher-Order Structural Modeling of Social Capital

When the full battery (BSCI, CES, Neighboring Behavior, and Citizen Participation) was examined via structural equation modeling (SEM), the data definitively verified a second-order, two-factor bifactorial configuration:

• Cognitive Latent Dimension: Manifesting robust secondary loadings from the Brief Sense of Community subscales and the Collective Efficacy Scale.
• Behavioral Latent Dimension: Manifesting substantial secondary loadings from the Neighboring Behavior Scale and the Citizen Participation Scale.

This structural division validated Perkins and Long’s theoretical framework, establishing that cognitive perceptions and behavioral acts operate as distinct, semi-autonomous domains within the broader construct of urban social capital.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Multilevel, multidimensional survey battery measuring cognitive and behavioral localized social capital.
• Target Population: Adult community residents, neighborhood householders, and urban tenant populations (ages 18 and older).
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil survey, structured face-to-face field interview, telephone survey, or secure computerized assessment.
• Completion Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes for the complete battery; approximately 2 to 3 minutes for the Brief Sense of Community Index alone.
• Primary Subscales & Structural Architecture:
  • Brief Sense of Community Index (BSCI): 8 items divided into Social Connections (Items 1–3), Mutual Concern (Items 4–6), and Community Values (Items 7–8).
  • Collective Efficacy Scale (CES): 6 items measuring perceived organizational block capacity.
  • Citizen Participation Scale: 8 items measuring formal organizational involvement.
  • Neighboring Behavior Scale: 5 items measuring informal reciprocal neighboring assistance.
• Response Formats:
  • BSCI Items 1–5: Dichotomous true/false format (1 = “mostly false”, 2 = “mostly true”; a 4- or 5-point Likert scale is recommended for specialized parametric analyses).
  • BSCI Item 6: 3-point ordinal scale (1 = “go own way”, 2 = “a little of both”, 3 = “watch after”).
  • BSCI Item 7: 3-point ordinal scale (1 = “not”, 2 = “somewhat”, 3 = “very”).
  • BSCI Item 8: 3-point ordinal scale (1 = “very little”, 2 = “in between”, 3 = “strong”).
  • CES Items 1–6: 3-point likelihood scale (1 = “not likely”, 2 = “somewhat likely”, 3 = “very likely”).
  • Citizen Participation Items: Dichotomous behavioral engagement (0 = “no participation”, 1 = “participation”). Item 3 hours recoded: 0 = “none”, 1 = “8 or more hours”.
  • Neighboring Behavior Items: Frequency count (0 = “none”, 1–7 = “exact number”, 8 = “eight or more”).
• Scoring and Transformation Procedures:
  • Reverse coding is required for negative items: BSCI Item 1 (“Very few of my neighbors know me”) and BSCI Item 2 (“I have almost no influence over what this block is like”) must be reverse-coded prior to subscale or total score computation.
  • Subscale scores are typically computed by summing or averaging the items within that subscale. When standardizing across mixed formats (e.g., combining 2-point and 3-point items), raw scores are converted into standardized z-scores or percentage-of-maximum possible (POMP) scores.
  • For multilevel ecological analyses, individual scores are aggregated at the street block level to compute mean environmental social capital coefficients.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Social Capital Survey Scales and the Brief Sense of Community Index were formally published in 2002 by Douglas D. Perkins and D. Adam Long within their seminal book chapter titled “Neighborhood sense of community and social capital: A multi-level analysis” in the volume Psychological Sense of Community: Research, Applications, and Implications (edited by A. Fisher, C. Sonn, & B. Bishop; New York: Plenum Press).

Licensing and Usage Conditions: The instrument is classified as an open-access public-domain assessment tool for non-commercial academic, scientific research, pedagogical, and community-development evaluative applications. No licensing fees or formal royalty payments are mandated for scholarly use. Researchers utilizing the scales are expected to provide formal attribution and standard academic citations to Perkins and Long (2002). Institutional reproduction for profit or proprietary commercial repackaging requires written permission from the copyright holder and authors.

References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
• Chavis, D. M., & Wandersman, A. (1990). Sense of community in the urban environment: A catalyst for participation and community development. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18(1), 55–81. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00922689
• Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S120. https://doi.org/10.1086/228943
• McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00922690
• Perkins, D. D., & Long, D. A. (2002). Neighborhood sense of community and social capital: A multi-level analysis. In A. Fisher, C. Sonn, & B. Bishop (Eds.), Psychological sense of community: Research, applications, and implications (pp. 291–318). Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0719-2_15
• Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster. https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.361990
• Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5328.918

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)