Social Capital Atlas

These datasets provide measures of Social Capital for counties, ZIP codes, high schools, and colleges in the United States based on data from Facebook. The Social Capital Atlas dataset is the result of a collaboration between Meta, Opportunity Insights, and researchers from Harvard, New York University, and Stanford. We use methods from the differential privacy literature to add noise to these aggregate statistics to protect privacy while maintaining a high level of statistical reliability. See the accompanying README.pdf and papers published in Nature for more details on data construction, methods, and results.

We construct three measures of social capital:

1. Connectedness - The extent to which people with different characteristics are friends with each other. This includes our main economic connectedness measure.

2. Cohesiveness - The degree to which friendship networks are clustered into cliques and whether friendships tend to be supported by mutual friends. This includes our clustering and support ratio measures.

3. Civic Engagement - Indices of trust or participation in civic organizations. This includes our volunteering rate measure.

A visualization of this data is available here: www.socialcapital.org

Research publications for the Social Capital Atlas dataset are available here:

• Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility

• Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness

Any researcher using the data should reference/cite the following papers:
Chetty, Raj, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenberg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo Barber ́a, Monica Bhole, and Nils Wernerfelt (2022a). “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility.” Nature 608 (7921): 108-121, 2022.

Download Citation here: https://citation-needed.springer.com/v2/references/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4?format=refman&flavour=citation

Chetty, Raj, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Fluegge, Sara Gong, Federico Gonzalez, Armelle Grondin, Matthew Jacob, Drew Johnston, Martin Koenen, Eduardo Laguna-Muggenberg, Florian Mudekereza, Tom Rutter, Nicolaj Thor, Wilbur Townsend, Ruby Zhang, Mike Bailey, Pablo Barber ́a, Monica Bhole, and Nils Wernerfelt (2022b). “Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness.” Nature 608 (7921): 122-134, 2022.

Download Citation here: https://citation-needed.springer.com/v2/references/10.1038/s41586-022-04997-3?format=refman&flavour=citation

• This dataset updates: As needed