DATASETS
Social Capital Atlas
The Social Capital Atlas dataset shows new insights on how communities are connected using data from Facebook friendships. We construct and analyze measures of social capital across counties, ZIP codes, high schools, and colleges in the United States.
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Key Features
Three types of social capital
We organize measures of social capital into three categories: Connectedness; Cohesiveness; and Civic Engagement.Inform social policies
The amount of economic connectedness is one of the strongest predictors of upward economic mobility in the United States identified to date.Privacy
We use methods from the differential privacy literature to add noise to these aggregate statistics to protect privacy while maintaining a high level of statistical reliability.
Methodology
Step 1: Construct social capital measures
We use a privacy-protected sample of friendship ties for users aged 25-44 in the United States to construct measures for how communities are connected.Step 2: Measure different types of social capital
We construct several measures of social capital: (1) Connectedness - The extent to which people with different characteristics are friends with each other. This includes our main economic connectedness measure. (2) Cohesiveness - The degree to which friendship networks are clustered into cliques and whether friendships tend to be supported by mutual friends. This includes our clustering and support ratio measures. (3) Civic Engagement - Indices of trust or participation in civic organizations. This includes our volunteering rate measure.Step 3: Aggregate to community and school level metrics
We build aggregated measures of network connectedness and community characteristics. We used methods from the differential privacy literature to add noise to these aggregate statistics to protect privacy while maintaining a high level of statistical reliability.RESOURCES
Using Social Capital Atlas
This data can be downloaded from the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
Download from the Humanitarian Data Exchange