Assessing social cohesion as social relationships

This chapter is concerned with the empirical operationalization of social cohesion. It starts by considering social science concepts at a meta-level, as well as establishing concrete criteria for the construction of composite indicators. The database is presented, consisting of all present rounds of the European Social Survey - an extensive dataset encompassing more than 440,000 individual respondents nested in 38 European societies across 16 years (2002-2018). Fitting indicators (face-validity) are selected from this dataset for the purpose of measuring the triad of social trust, institutional trust, and openness. For the purpose of assessing the relationship between the items selected to measure social cohesion, correlations, as well as dimensionality tested by performing a confirmatory factor analysis through a structural equation model, are inspected. Items show very high factor loadings on the assumed dimensions and a quite balanced relationship between the three latent constructs (dimensions). Goodness-of-fit and various robustness tests of the model are presented and discussed. The extensive tests, missing in many similar studies, reveal that the provided measurement model can be considered statistically validated and the measurement hypothesis is thereby confirmed. The chapter also describes the creation of a score for the social cohesion index (SCI). For each dimension, factor scores are normalized to range from zero to one. The scores of the three dimensions are equally weighted into the overall index. The final score of cohesion is also converted into a standardized measure ranging from 0 to 1. It should be said that even the most complex statistical aspects in this chapter and throughout the book are explained in a way that will make it possible for a non-familiar reader to grasp the methods being used with ease. This second section of this chapter discusses the methodological advantages of the newly developed measure of social cohesion by comparing it to the highly visible Social Cohesion Radar of the Bertelsmann Foundation. The main advantage of the proposed measure is that social cohesion can be assessed as theorized - on multiple interdependent social levels, thereby providing a much-differentiated and more nuanced understanding of cohesion. Furthermore, the (within-country) regional scope of the analysis in comparison with other studies is stressed. Another important advantage of the measure is the overall geographic scope it is able to co