Measuring Civic Culture

Because civic culture touches so many parts of American life and looks different in different places, it can be difficult to measure. This makes it challenging to understand whether programs designed to improve civic culture are having their intended effect and how they could be improved. Measurement is also important for engaging philanthropic funders and other stakeholders who might support the expansion of successful initiatives. Finally, measurement can help direct civic catalysts toward areas of potential growth and unmet needs.

Measures can be sorted into four main groups. First are measures that focus on supply and demand: the availability of opportunities to participate in activities that foster a healthy civic culture and ways to measure people’s desire for these opportunities. Second, measures can look at the outcomes of such participation in terms of changes in attitudes or behaviors among individuals. Third, measures can track community-level changes in attitudes or behaviors. Finally, these same changes can be tracked at the national level.

Given the numerous ways to measure civic culture, this section offers questions that can serve as a framework for civic catalysts.
 

Measuring Change at the Programmatic and Individual Level
 

Measures can aim to answer questions about whether organizations are increasing the supply of healthy civic culture opportunities and whether demand for such opportunities manifests in participation. They may include questions such as:

• How many people participated in an activity?
• Which people participated? Were new people brought in?
• How actively did participants engage? Did they engage with other people? Were those people like or unlike them?

Measurement can also focus on the attitudes of people who took part in a particular program that relates to building a healthy civic culture. These can mostly be captured in evaluation surveys sent to participants, such as the Belonging Barometer (see The Belonging Barometer). Some surveys can be sent both before and after an event, allowing for the assessment of change in views based on participation. Such surveys might ask the following questions:

• Did people like the experience?
• Did they feel welcome?
• Did they feel a sense of connection to others?
• Did they feel agency in their participation?
   

Measuring Change at the Community Level
 

Many measures—for example, the RAYSE Index at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, the CFA’s Progress Meters, AmeriCorps’ Volunteering and Civic Life in America research, the National Conference on Citizenship Civic Health Index, and the index produced by the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee’s social capital project—capture aggregate responses to individual surveys across a particular community or geographic region. Still others focus on the supply of healthy civic opportunities, such as the Mapping the Modern Agora study produced by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Assessing opportunity, access, and change in each community might be addressed by asking questions such as:

• How many organizations are offering opportunities to participate in a healthy civic culture?
• How many people, across all programs and activities, are participating in civic life? Is this rate of participation increasing or decreasing?
• What is the total investment—from public, private, and philanthropic sources—in civic culture in a given community?

Measurements can also focus on questions about the beliefs individuals have about their community. These measures are most useful for thinking about the community as a whole rather than just those who participate in specific programs. Measures can focus on the attitudes and beliefs of community members, as well as disparities within a community, such as:

• Do community members feel more, less, or the same levels of connection or social trust toward others in their community?
• Which community members feel more, less, or the same levels of connection or trust toward others in their community?
• Do those who participate in civic opportunity programs and those who do not participate hold different views?
• Do community members report more, less, or the same views about their ability to make changes in their community?
• Have organizations that are not primarily focused on civic culture adopted elements that would foster it, even if a healthy civic culture is not the primary focus?
   

Measuring Change at the National Level
 

Changes to national civic culture may be captured through representative survey data or other studies that address questions such as:

• Is social and political trust increasing or decreasing over time? For whom is trust increasing or decreasing?
• Are participation rates in civil society increasing or decreasing? Are rates of participation concentrated among some groups but not others?
• Do people report more, less, or the same beliefs about their ability to make changes in their community?
   

The Belonging Barometer

Over Zero and the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council partnered on a research project to examine the state of belonging in American society.57 The project’s final report, The Belonging Barometer, is a survey tool that provides a nuanced, quantifiable measure of belonging.58

The barometer measures ten aspects of an individual’s experience in a particular environment or community. Taken together, these elements encompass what the researchers behind the barometer deem to be the three key components of belonging: social connection, psychological safety, and cocreation.
 

Belonging Barometer
 

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements? 
(1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree)
 

1. I feel emotionally connected to [name of respondent’s local community].
2. People in [name of respondent’s local community] welcome and include me in activities.
3. I am unable to influence decision-making in [name of respondent’s local community].*
4. I feel unable to be my whole and authentic self with people in [name of respondent’s local community].*
5. People in [name of respondent’s local community] value me and my contributions.
6. My relationships with others in [name of respondent’s local community] are as satisfying as I want them to be.
7. I feel like an “insider” who understands how [name of respondent’s local community] works.
8. I am comfortable expressing my opinions in [name of respondent’s local community].
9. I am treated as “less than” other residents in [name of respondent’s local community].*
10. When interacting with people in [name of respondent’s local community], I feel like I truly belong.

* For this analysis and preliminary report, we used very basic controls. It is our hope that scholars with thematic expertise will examine these data further, controlling for factors known to be theoretically supported in their field. 

Source: Reprinted with permission of Over Zero and the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council.
 

Respondents rate each of the ten factors on a scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”). After responses are collected, each individual’s level of belonging can be measured on a sliding scale from 1 (“Strong exclusion”) to 5 (“Strong belonging”).
 

Belonging as a Scale

A variety of stakeholders can use the Belonging Barometer to measure belonging in their respective institutions or settings. Examples include schools, universities, or hospitals looking to devise support services and report on student or patient well-being; workplaces wishing to track belonging within teams or across the workforce; and municipalities or government agencies that wish to track citizen well-being. In all these contexts, the barometer can inform the design of programs while allowing for tracking over time.
 

Event Evaluation Questions at the Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center administers voluntary post-program surveys to gather feedback about visitors’ experiences. Each survey contains several questions, some multiple choice and some open-ended. In addition, a section of the survey displays a wide-ranging list of words, some positive and some negative. The survey asks participants to select which word(s) best describe the experience they just had. In the summer of 2023, Lincoln Center found that welcome was the word selected most often. By tracking which words participants choose to describe their experience, Lincoln Center is able to measure subjective feelings of belonging, participation, power, agency, and identity over time and can adjust their programming accordingly in response to participant feedback.

Endnotes

• 57

  Over Zero.

• 58

  The Belonging Barometer.