There is a growing policy focus on community strengthening, which demands greater understandings of the significance of social connectedness, and political capacity for coordinated action. In this context, the importance of understanding what is often referred to as 'social capital' has become starkly apparent. Social capital represents the benefits of informal sociability, cohesiveness and connection to community and social institutions. As a concept, social capital has now been taken up at many levels of governance. From the World Bank, to the National Productivity Commission, to state departments and local authorities, governments are searching for new ways of facilitating local self-reliance and re-forging effective connections with a diverse citizenry. However, despite the recent focus on the concept 'social capital', better tools for theorising and measuring it in relation to the effectiveness of policy interventions aimed at increasing the connections between government and citizens, are required.

While social capital clearly relates to the capital generated through relationships with others, much of the research on this topic uses individual level, rather than network-based approaches. Network ties provide crucial links between actors as well as to groups, cultural resources, neighbourhoods, and communities, playing an important role in structuring opportunities and constraints. The term social connectedness is used to indicate that social capital using network-based approaches are of central interest here. However, we have gathered together the literature which relates to both:

1. social capital, cohesion, connectedness, which deals with the quality of social interactions (e.g. most people in my local area can be trusted); and
2. social networks, including the size of networks, (e.g. how many friends do you have?) or network structure through measures that utilise social network analysis techniques (e.g. who would you go to for help?).

A small grant from VicHealth was used to unpack, reframe and situate the concepts associated with social connectedness in communities and to explicitly link together social connectedness, policy development, and health and well being. One product of this grant is the social connectedness bibliography presented here.

A literature search was conducted using the terms:

• social capital
• social cohesion
• social connectedness
• social networks

The search was conducted separately for Australian and international literatures. It was also focused on concepts of connectedness at the local level (communities, neighbourhoods, local areas, municipalities etc), at finding literature that made specific mention of policy and governance, and at identifying empirical studies where tools for measuring social connectedness had been developed and used. This clearly does not represent the total sum of the vast and rapidly growing literature on social capital. The search was also limited to publications that have appeared in the last five years - that is, from 2000 onwards, but a number of highly relevant publications from earlier years are included.

The bibliography is divided into groups in terms of whether the focus is Australian or international, whether it specifically discusses empirical tools for collecting and analysing social connectedness data, and whether it is specifically related to health and well being. It contains almost 500 references in total.

For more information:

• Social Connectedness Bibliography
• Project Information
• Investigator Information