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Dr Antonio SilvaThe Behavioural Insights Team
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Lucy MakinsonThe Behavioural Insights Team
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Martin WesselThe Behavioural Insights Team
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Dr Mike BaileyMeta
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Dr Shankar IyerMeta
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Itamar RosennMeta
Project overview
This project will investigate how social capital affects life outcomes, how different environments facilitate its creation, and how it can be developed to improve people’s lives.
Why is this important?
Social capital is the relationships and social connections which provide support, information, and opportunities throughout someone’s life. It has wide-ranging impacts, affecting people’s health, happiness, opportunities, and wealth.
Researching social capital at scale has been historically difficult, so research has often been conducted in specific closed-group environments. This has limited the generalisability of the findings. However, for the first time, the research team will have exclusive access to Facebook and Instagram social connections data for the UK. Building on the work of Professor Raj Chetty at Harvard University, this project will build the evidence base for how social capital drives outcomes in the UK, where and how it is created and, ultimately, what policymakers and communities can do to foster it.
What does it involve?
The project will be led by the Behavioural Insights Team, with specialist partners in each of the three project phases:
- In partnership with Meta and supported by Opportunity Insights and Stripe Partners, anonymised data from 50 million Facebooks users and 30 million Instagram users, combined with other public datasets, will be used to identify the impact of social capital and the factors that facilitate its creation.
- In partnership with Neighbourly Lab and The Royal Society of Arts (RSA), the second phase will involve ethnographic research in four communities with different levels of social capital, to provide qualitative insights into how social capital is experienced and created in practice.
- In partnership with The Royal Society of Arts, the final phase will develop actionable approaches for building social capital. Practitioner roundtables and participatory sessions with community members will combine evidence-based practice with place-based implementation.
The work of the Behavioural Insights Team, the RSA, Stripe partners and the Neighbourly lab on this project is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Contributions from Meta and Opportunity Insights are self-funded.
How will it make a difference?
Outputs from the project will aim at three outcomes:
- Make social capital a more tractable area of policy and research.
- Design actional and evidence-based interventions to build social capital.
- Empower leaders and communities to build tailored solutions for local needs.
Policy maker briefings, local government briefings, an open-source data visualisation tool, Journal articles, and a social capital toolkit will be produced in addition to a publicly available report.