The Community Capitals Framework: an empirical examination of internal relationships

Abstract

There is a small but growing amount of research on the use the Community Capitals Framework (CCF) as it relates to changes and development at the community level. There are conflicting arguments regarding how the community capitals are related to each other, but almost no empirical studies that actually investigate this relationship. Using the CCF, this article examines how the capitals may be related using data from a large sample of participants in community leadership development education programs where the framework was used to document the effects of these programs. Discussion examines how the empirical relationships among the capitals effect community development and how useful the CCF is in helping to understand this process. The findings suggest that elements of the CCF need some modification as the process appears to have a more complex relationship than proposed in prior research.

Keywords:

• democratic theory and participation
• rural community development
• human capital
• leadership
• social capital

Notes

1. We recognize that not all community change results in material benefits or improvements of some sort and that the community capitals can be deployed for maintaining status quo as easily and effectively as for change. This research was funded in part by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture, National Research Initiative under Grant No. 2006-35401-17560.

2. The complete methodology is discussed in Pigg, Gasteyer, Martin, Keating, and Apaliyah (in press).

3. This clustering technique produces what is known as a dendogram, and it is used to represent the hierarchical nature of the relationships among variables so the underlying statistical procedures used are somewhat different than for a principal components analysis. This hierarchical clustering technique relies on measures of the proximity between each case or the distance between the empirical values for each case (see Rencher, 2002). Discussion of the cluster analysis results is included in the text. Actual figures may be obtained from the corresponding author.