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Research Archive

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May 6, 2024

How States and Communities Can Strengthen Marriages 

Family is the greatest source of social capital, providing the setting in which people grow, develop, and anchor their lives. Stable and healthy marriages are at the foundation of strong…

March 12, 2024

Family Dinners Offer a Silver Lining in a Bleak Social Capital Landscape

…not widen over time. Our colleague, Dan Cox, has surveyed American adults and asked them retrospectively whether they had “family meals everyday growing up.” He found that the share answering…

February 5, 2024

Why We All Rely On the Organized Kindness of Strangers

Our church caught fire [i] a few weeks ago. The pastor and a few other leaders had just gotten out of a Monday night meeting when they found the sanctuary…

July 17, 2023

What the Rise in Dog Attacks Signals About the State of America’s Social Capital

If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of being attacked or bitten by a dog, you’re not alone. The one time it happened to me was while walking at…

July 12, 2023

Local News and Social Capital

Joseph Schumpeter famously observed that capitalism unleashed “creative destruction.”[i] If that is so for American journalism, just such a wave has, without doubt, been destroying local newspapers. What’s not yet clear…

May 3, 2023

The Mainline Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Social Capitalism

…and areas with many mainliners the best. Sociologists have observed these trends in prior work, including our colleague, W. Bradford Wilcox. Wilcox argues that mainline adherents tend to “talk left…