Page "Social capital" Paragraph 38

There is no widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, which has become a debate in itself: why refer to this phenomenon as ' capital ' if there is no true way to measure it?

While one can usually intuitively sense the level / amount of social capital present in a given relationship ( regardless of type or scale ), quantitative measuring has proven somewhat complicated.

This has resulted in different metrics for different functions.

In measuring political social capital, it is common to take the sum of society ’ s membership of its groups.

Groups with higher membership ( such as political parties ) contribute more to the amount of capital than groups with lower membership, although many groups with low membership ( such as communities ) still add up to be significant.

While it may seem that this is limited by population, this need not be the case as people join multiple groups.

In a study done by Yankee City, a community of 17, 000 people was found to have over 22, 000 different groups.