Social Cohesion and Sport in Overijssel : A Social Network Analysis
2018
The province of overijssel is aiming to increase social quality in overijssel. It is for this reason
that they have decided to fund programs that they believe will promote social quality in the
communities. For this year’s programs they have decided to focus on sports programs. While
they give funding to sports clubs and sport’s programs that meet their requirements, they do not
have evidence that the funding is having the desired effect of promoting social quality. This is
where the University of Twente and this paper come into place.
While the province spends money they believe is helping to promote social quality, they don’t
have a way to back that belief up. The first step to help is to determine what social quality is and
how such a thing can be monitored. After conducting a literature review, it was discovered that
leading theories of social quality splits social quality into four interconnected sub-parts.
Economic security, social cohesion, social inclusion and self-empowerment. Of these four,
social cohesion is most often associated with sport participation, so this became the focus of
this research paper. How can sport participation promote social cohesion?
Delving deeper into literature, it was found that social cohesion is often defined using the
concept of social capital. People can grow their social capital through their network of people
they meet throughout their lives. Social capital growth leads to opportunities in education,
employment and social mobility. There are two important types of social capital when it comes
to sport participation, bonding and bridging capital. Bonding is the capital between close friends
and family, while bridging is the relationships created by new people that can help bring you into
new groups and communities. The literature showed that sport participation helped to create
and develop both bonding and bridging capital, which helps to create higher levels of social
cohesion.
With the discoveries it was time to tackle the problem of the province, how can it be determined
if their interventions in sport programs are having the desired effect of increasing social
cohesion? After conducting a survey with 44 sport participants in the province, it was shown that
people, who participate in sport, do in fact have social capital that they would not otherwise
have if they did not participate in sport. It was also shown that the people who participated
heavily in sport (3+ times in the week) had bigger social networks and capital than people who
participated less.
With this accomplished the paper showed that the provinces funding in sport programs was not
misplaced to promote social cohesion, but maybe there is another way in which it can be
visualized, to perhaps make smarter choices of where to focus sport funding. Using the idea of
a social network analysis, and with additional information from the survey where the participants
listed their social networks, visualizations were created to show just how sport participants
create bonding and bridging capital. With a proper approach it would be possible to see the
effects the sport funding has on communities and how it connects members of sports clubs to
other sport clubs, cities, people and job opportunities that they would not have, if they did not
participate in sport.
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