U.S. Government expands social capital measures

Flickr/citychiccountrymouse

The Census through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is expanding the items that it asks about civic engagement and social capital.

On the November 2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) supplement, BLS will now ask about:

• Voting in local elections (such as mayor or school board)
• Frequency of using the internet to express opinions about political or community issues
• Frequency of communicating with family and friends
• Trust of neighbors
• Confidence in institutions (specifically corporations, the media and public schools)

These metrics will show up in the 2012 Civic Life in America report.

Many other measures of social capital and civic engagement are already being surveyed by BLS on the November supplement (more here), and BLS also asks on their September supplement metrics on volunteering, attendance at public meetings, and whether Americans have worked with neighbors to fix/improve something.  The volunteering measures are reported by CNCS on the Volunteering in America website.

See “Census to collect new social capital measures”

Read earlier post “Advances in social capital measurement“

Other thin-slicing volunteering examples: Phylo, FoldIt, EterRNA and Galaxy Zoo

We wrote earlier about efforts to capture short amounts of volunteering help from individuals (thin-slice volunteering). The latest entry is Phylo, which turns comparative genomics and pattern recognition into a game.

Enjoy and make the world a better place.

See also examples like FoldIt, EteRNA and Galaxy Zoo.

Social capital games

The New York Times Science Times section on Tuesday had an article discussing why real life couldn’t be as engaging as games.  One section referred to games designed by researchers to spark cooperative behavior or  get people to compete on being most helpful.

Excerpt:

…Dr. [Jane] McGonigal…has designed Cruel 2 B Kind, a game in which players advance by being nice to strangers in public places, and which has been played in more than 50 cities on four continents.

She and her husband are among the avid players of Chorewars, an online game in which they earn real rewards (like the privilege of choosing the music for their next car ride) by doing chores at their apartment in San Francisco. Cleaning the bathroom is worth so many points that she has sometimes hid the toilet brush to prevent him from getting too far ahead.

Other people, working through a “microvolunteering” Web site called Sparked, are using a smartphone app undertake quests for nonprofit groups like First Aid Corps, which is compiling a worldwide map of the locations of defibrillators available for cardiac emergencies. Instead of looking for magical healing potions in virtual worlds, these players scour buildings for defibrillators that haven’t been cataloged yet. If that defibrillator later helps save someone’s life, the player’s online glory increases (along with the sense of fiero).

[Fiero comes from Italian “pride” and refers to when the gamer lifts both arms above his/her head in triumph.]

Cruel 2 B Kind is interesting.  It takes place in a defined real world environment: e.g., it could be Central Park from 5-6 on 12/10/2010.  No one knows who is playing and who isn’t but all players have to remain in the open in that location for the entire duration.  Each player is randomly assigned a fatal weakness from a list of possibilities (e.g., being serenaded, being complimented, being cheered on). In order to slay your opponent, you have to engage in these acts of kindness frequently, willing to have complete strangers (not playing the game) be “collateral damage” in your effort to slay your fellow gamers. The result is a war of kindness within the “arena”.

Read John Tierney, “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming” (New York Times, Dec. 7, 2010)

See earlier blog post on The Extraordinaries (now renamed as Sparked)  and Thin-Slice Volunteering.

New: quality social capital data available online

Rating of large cities in Group Participation 2008-2009, CNCS data

The Corporation for National Service (CNCS) several years ago started making volunteering data available online through Volunteering in America , with a research brief, rankings and profiles for all states and big cities, and even downloadable summary data.

The Corporation has now released comparable social capital data.  See: Civic Life in America website.

They have an Issue Brief describing their overall results across 5 dimensions (service which includes volunteering, group participation,  connecting to civic information, social connectedness,  and political action).

One can see the ranking of states or large cities across these dimensions (volunteering, voting, working with neighbors or group participation).

And one can see geographic profiles of states (here’s NY) or communities (here’s the Twin Cities for example).  And summary data can be exported (to a PDF, Excel table, etc.).

These data, in addition to being a great boon to scholars, are highly useful for local leaders.  For example, Governor Schwarzenegger used the California volunteer data to develop new public polices around volunteering, state legislative support for those efforts, and ultimately created the first cabinet-level position on service and volunteering in the state.  Driven by public discussions about the low level of volunteering in New York City, highlighted through CNCS research releases, Mayor Bloomberg launched a new civic initiative for the city including launching a Civic Corps, further buttressed with borough-level data from CNCS.  Many press outlets help spread the word about how cities and states are doing against one another and encourage friendly competition for citizens to become more actively engaged.

Well done and keep up the good work.  With thanks to CNCS for their leadership on this issue.

See earlier post on advances in social capital measurement.

See later post on “US expands social capital measures“

How Woody Allen misses the boat in comparing religion to fortune cookies

[cross-post from AmericanGrace.org Blog]

Woody Allen on Tonight Show ('65); photo by John McNab, marked for cropping

While I respect Woody Allen greatly as a comic, interviewed by the New York Times, he said recently:

“To me there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”

Brad Hirschfield from the Washington Post’s On Faith column ponders:

“Is he wrong or is he right? Of course, the answer is yes. In many ways there are no differences between any of the faiths and practices which help us in our lives, especially in the most significant sense – that they help us. But in other ways, there are profound differences.

“Fortune cookies and fortune tellers help only the individual who avails themselves of their respective insights, or is that ‘insights’? – you decide. The organized religions to which Mr. Allen compares them should also connect us to things beyond ourselves and our own immediate needs.”

The question of whether all religions are equally valid or invalid is a matter for theologians, and we’ll leave that debate to them.  As for the latter, that any religion is equally helpful to one another or to fortune cookies, American Grace does have a lot to say.  We do generally agree with Woody Allen that most of the religions we looked at seemed to be equally helpful.  Some of the benefits, as Hirschfield notes, extend just to the practitioners, and some extend to the broader community.  We discuss in American Grace evidence that those who are more religious join more secular causes, give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, are happier, and are more engaged in their community (compared to their demographic twins that are not religious).   [Read the details in American Grace which appears in bookstores around the country and on Amazon in October.]

As to Woody’s quip that religions are as helpful as a fortune cookie, we have to respectfully disagree (backed by a significant marshaling of the evidence).  If Chinese restaurant-goers have found fortune cookies as powerful as religion, we’d like to know about them…

Elsewhere in the interview, Woody says about his new movie (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger):

“I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going.”

We don’t believe it is delusion that is doing the heavy lifting, especially given the fact that we find that it is having friends at church rather than religious beliefs or theology that predicts religious adherents being better citizens and happier.  If it’s merely about delusion, why aren’t the people quietly praying at home or reading their religious texts at home equally engaged?  Faith might “keep us going”, but it is being in vibrant religious communities that keeps us engaged.

Read American Grace in October and see which argument convinces you more…

Health benefits of volunteering

The NY Times had an interesting piece yesterday on the health benefits of volunteering.

They cite Stephen Post’s work, which I have discussed earlier, but also notes a 2002 Boston College study (Paul Arnstein et al.) and a California Buck Institute for Age Research study (Doug Oman et al.).

The article discusses several studies that suggest that the causal pathway may run through lower stress and a “helper’s high”.

See the underlying article:  “In Month of Giving, a Healthy Reward” (NYT, Science Times, Tara Parker-Pope, 12/1/09)

Number of volunteers on Wikipedia dropping

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of volunteer editors on Wikipedia is dropping.

Entities such as Wikipedia or Linux have always been a bit of a mystery to economists as to why people with great knowledge donate their time to write articles or software.  Some are motivated by pure altruism, others by professional credentialing that accompanies being a leader on software like Linux.  [See Jochai Benkler on Wikipedia, Linux and the gift economy in “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” or crowdsourcing]

In any event, the number of volunteer editors on Wikipedia fell last year by 49,000 (a jump of 10-fold over the prior year’s loss of 4,900 editors).  There is active disagreement whether this has resulted from their being less new ground on Wikipedia as more and more things have been covered or whether editors are put off by increased bureaucracy Wikipedia imposed in an effort to increase the accuracy of Wikipedia articles and decrease the mischief.  Moreover, Wikipedia has become less friendly to new contributions: “In 2008, Wikipedia’s editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to data compiled by social-computing researcher Ed Chi of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.”

Despite this, Wikipedia’s popularity continues to grow: “Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.”

One interesting snippet from the article is that 87% of the volunteer writers on Wikipedia are men.

The article does point out that Wikipedia founder Jimmie Wales is more interested in web traffic to Wikipedia and accuracy of the articles than in the volume of volunteerism on the site.

See: Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Volunteers Log Off As Wikipedia Ages“, Wall Street Journal, 11/23/09.

Various developments in social capital

Water Giggles by McBeth -- Flickr photo

Sorry I’ve been offline for a bit.

Here is a this-and-that post regarding various developments in social capital.

• The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) has a wonderful new revamped site on Volunteering in America.  They also headlined findings from the Current Population Survey data in 2008 on volunteering and civic engagement showing volunteering remaining steady in 2008 and “[t]he number of people who worked with their neighbors to fix a community problem rose by 31 percent, from 15.2 million in 2007 to 19.9 million in 2008”, a remarkable increase in a year, which CNCS attributes to the Obama Administration’s United We Serve initiative and Serve.gov website.
• The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is releasing a new report “Civic Health and Hard Times” on September 9, 2009 at their annual conference on the “Opportunity Cost of Civic Engagement“.  Stay tuned for the findings.  We have some active research in this area on the impact of individual and aggregate economic hardship on levels of civic engagement which we have not published yet; a description of some of the literature in this area can be found in this earlier post.
• Various sites have blogged (here or here) or described an interesting conference in late July at Tufts (The Obama Administration’s Civic Agenda After Six Months), organized by Peter Levine at Tufts, and bringing together some scholars on civic engagement (including my HKS colleagues Archon Fung and Marshall Ganz) with folks from the Obama Administration (like Allen Solomont from CNCS) trying to set an agenda for the Obama Administration.
• Also in early August was the Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy II conference in DC (organized by Demos. AmericaSpeaks and Everyday Democracy).  See descriptions of the content here.
• And BTW, my colleague Robert Putnam was quoted in a Forbes article entitled “Loneliness Can Kill You” about the research of University of Chicago neuroscientist and physiologist, John T. Cacioppo.

Thin-slice volunteering

Driven by concern that 73% of Americans do not volunteer, the developers of Extraordinaries have decided to try to enable smart-phones to be used with thin-slice volunteering.

It’s part of the ever-shrinking notion of volunteering.  Volunteering used to mean some regular commitment to a cause (mentoring a kid, working every Saturday in a soup kitchen, visiting an elderly shut-in weekly, etc.).  In the 1990s, the Cares organizations (NY Cares, Hands on Atlanta, etc.) realized that yuppie go-go Americans either wouldn’t make a long-term commitment like this or didn’t have control over their schedule.  This gave rise to monthly schedules of interesting one-off volunteer opportunities that members could sign up for.  The 1980s and 1990s also gave rise to corporate volunteering days and “Days of Service” like the one on MLK’s birthday before Obama’s inauguration organized by USAService.org.

Now the Extraordinaries ‘ founders focus on the fact that there may be millions of smartphone American users who can’t (or won’t) even make a day-long commitment to volunteering, but they collectively have billions of free hours in micro-slices (while waiting for or riding the bus, while waiting for a meeting to begin, sitting in an airport, etc.).

They are trying to invent lots of collectively useful tasks that Americans could be doing during those times (other than playing video games), and make the interaction fun and exciting, and change the culture of waiting into producing a collective good.

Applications use smartphone features  like  Internet, graphics, camera, GPS, video, audio and break tasks up into ones that can be done in a few minutes.  Possible tasks include:

• Translating micro-finance loan applications into other languages to find funders for the developing world (Kiva).
• Transcribing subtitles for human rights videos (Witness).
• Helping NASA find craters on the surface of Mars (Clickworkers).
• Tagging old photos in the Library of Congress so others could search them
• Collecting data on urban birds (Celebrate Urban Birds).

If this cannibalizes existing volunteering, I’m not sure that this will be a win-win for society, but if it augments the amount of volunteer labor in the US, it could have clearly beneficial results.

Note: some of the health benefits of volunteering undoubtedly stem from a sense of engagement in society that volunteers have and some from the inter-personal ties (social capital) developed through volunteering.  Virtually all of the existing applications that Extraordinaries plan to tap into are devoid of social capital (see above list).  We encourage Extraordinaries to be creative about thin-slice volunteering opportunities that could augment social ties and social trust.  For example, they mention the idea of using smart phones in thin slices to help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL).  Depending on how this was set up, it could have interesting bridging social capital implications.  We hope that more such social capital-friendly thin-slice volunteer opportunities will emerge.

For an interesting post by Extraordinaries co-founder Ben Rigby on TechPresident, read here.

More to Give: the unfilled potential of senior service

We worked with Civic Enterprises on a report, sponsored by AARP on the fact that leaders and government are not doing enough to fully engage seniors in service.  The report More to Give: Tapping the Potential of the Baby Boomer, Silent and Greatest Generation, with an introduction by our own Robert Putnam, ex-Senator Harris Wofford (a long-time champion for service), and John Bridgeland (head of Civic Enterprises), outlines seniors’ fears that they will leave the country in worse shape, but notes how many of this cohort expect to increase their service in their retirement years, and notes how various government or private-sector programs could play a big role in increasing this service (e.g., a better information pipeline of how to get involved, enabling those who serve to get educational awards that can be shared with seniors’ grandchildren or other young needy Americans, or expanding some of the cost-effective governmental programs).  The program reports on findings from focus groups and a new large-scale survey of Boomers, the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation.