BONDING AND BRIDGING ACTIVITIES OF U.S. PENTECOSTALS

A growing body of literature weighs the influence of religion on civic life. Largely missing from prior analysis is Pentecostals. With novel religious beliefs and practices, Pentecostals might be expected to focus more on in-group bonding activities than out-group bridging activities. We test this expectation using national data from the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey. We contrast three measures of Pentecostalism: denominational affiliation, speaking in tongues at a place of worship, and self-described Pentecostal/charismatic identity. Results affirm high rates of bonding activity (church attendance and other congregation activity) for contemporary Pentecostals. Results for Pentecostal bridging are more complicated. People in Pentecostal denominations and those who speak in tongues participate less in community organizations and politics. However, this is more a function of social class and general conservatism than religious culture or sense of identity. Comparable to other conservative Protestants, the vitality of Pentecostal groups seems no impediment to democratic society.     

Multiracial Church Attendance and Support for Same‐Sex Romantic and Family Relationships

Research has found that attending a racially diverse congregation promotes more favorable attitudes toward interracial dating, marriage, and adoption, but does participation in an integrated faith community promote tolerance toward other non‐traditional romantic and family forms? This study examines the relationship between involvement in a racially diverse congregation and support for same‐sex romantic and family relationships. Data are taken from the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey. I fit logistic regression models to estimate the effect of attending a multiracial church on support for homosexuality, same‐sex marriage, and same‐sex adoption, net of sociodemographic and religious controls. Results indicate that persons who attend churches where between 25 and 75 percent of attendees are of another race are more likely to support gay sex, marriage, and adoption compared with those who attend more racially homogenous churches. This relationship generally holds when models are estimated for evangelicals and mainline Protestants separately, but not for Catholics. Findings suggest a link between religion‐based racial prejudice and heterosexism/homophobia and that increased exposure to racial diversity may promote a general tolerance toward non‐traditional romantic couples and families.     

The third therapeutic system: faith healing strategies in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic

Faith healing in sub-Saharan Africa has primarily been studied qualitatively among Pentecostal-Charismatic groups, and considered as its own phenomenon with little attention to its relationship to other modes of healing. Using data from Malawi, a religiously diverse African country with high HIV prevalence, we find that faith healing is pervasive across multiple religious traditions. For individuals, attending a faith healing congregation is associated with lower levels of generalized worry about AIDS, and this association is driven by those who switched churches before AIDS became widespread in rural areas. Use of condoms and traditional medicine are, on the other hand, positively associated with worry about AIDS. We argue that faith healing can be understood as a third therapeutic system that coexists with the well-documented biomedical and traditional systems. The success of faith healing approaches lies in their unique ability to combine individual-pragmatic and communal-ritualized aspects of healing to inform interpretations of the AIDS epidemic and its consequences.     

Role of Facebook use in predicting bridging and bonding social capital of Pakistani university students

ABSTRACT

The explanatory study aimed to examine the role of Facebook use (intensity of Facebook use, Facebook relationship maintenance behaviors, duration of use, and number of ties), motives of using Facebook (making new social ties, maintaining existing social ties, seeking and sharing information, self-expression, self-documentation, and recreation), and sociodemographic characteristics (age, education, gender, and monthly family income) in predicting the formation of bridging and bonding social capital among youth. Opting Putnam’s theory of social capital, a survey was conducted from eight randomly selected universities of Lahore, Pakistan. A total of 1,245 students, had an average age of 21, were participated in this study. Stepwise multiple linear regression technique was used to explain bridging and bonding social capital. The study found that motives of using Facebook had a major role in predicting bridging and bonding social capital of the students. The intensity of Facebook use and Facebook relationship maintenance behaviors were also positively correlated with bridging and bonding social capital. Except for the age for bonding social capital, no other sociodemographic variables had an influence on bridging and bonding social capital.     

Affiliative Segregation of Outsiders from a Community: Bonding and Bridging Social Capital in Hachimori-cho, Japan

Abstract: Social capital makes cooperation possible even in situations of social dilemma. People develop bonding social capital when their network is dense. However, bonding social capital tends to make them look inward and to foster strong out-group hostility, which hinders the development of bridging social capital between groups. I investigated the possibility that bonding social capital may help develop bridging social capital from which all group members gain profits. Fieldwork was conducted in Hachimori-cho, Japan, where outsider Saru-Oiage volunteers are segregated from community residents. The volunteers have dense social networks and develop bonding social capital. They gain skills and take pride and responsibility in their actions from the bonding social capital, so that they can pursue the same interests as community residents, namely, expel monkeys from farmlands. Residents accept volunteers eagerly because they work well, and the existence of "good" outsiders contributes to the development of local identity. An affiliative relationship between volunteers and residents is maintained by the enormous efforts of the coordinators. Because the coordinators recently immigrated to Hachimori, they could understand the situations of outsiders as well as those of community residents, and they gain the most benefits from bridging social capital. These conditions were necessary for bridging social capital, or the cooperative relationship, between the two groups in Hachimori-cho.     

Assessing structural correlates to social capital in Facebook ego networks

Research in computer-mediated communication has consistently asserted that Facebook use is positively correlated with social capital. This research has drawn primarily on Williams’ (2006) bridging and bonding scales as well as behavioral attributes such as civic engagement. Yet, as social capital is inherently a structural construct, it is surprising that so little work has been done relating social capital to social structure as captured by social network site (SNS) Friendship networks. Facebook is particularly well-suited to support the examination of structure at the ego level since the networks articulated on Facebook tend to be large, dense, and indicative of many offline foci (e.g., coworkers, friends from high school). Assuming that each one of these foci only partially overlap, we initially present two hypotheses related to Facebook social networks and social capital: more foci are associated with perceptions of greater bridging social capital and more closure is associated with greater bonding social capital. Using a study of 235 employees at a Midwestern American university, we test these hypotheses alongside self-reported measures of activity on the site. Our results only partially confirm these hypotheses. In particular, using a widely used measure of closure (transitivity) we observe a strong and persistent negative relationship to bonding social capital. Although this finding is initially counter-intuitive it is easily explained by considering the topology of Facebook personal networks: networks with primarily closed triads tend to be networks with tightly bound foci (such as everyone from high school knowing each other) and few connections between foci. Networks with primarily open triads signify many crosscutting friendships across foci. Therefore, bonding social capital appears to be less tied to local clustering than to global cohesion.     

Social capital and economic development in regional Australia: A case study

This article reports the findings of a case study of social capital and economic development conducted in two towns in regional Australia between 2001 and 2002. The hypothesis driving the research states that a town displaying a high level of social capital will also display a high level of economic development, while a town with a low level of social capital will display a low level of economic development. Moreover, it is suggested the social capital will exert a positive causal influence on economic development. The study goes some way to confirming this hypothesis and provides empirical evidence to suggest that both bonding and bridging social capital are important for successful community economic development outcomes.     

Women’s Voluntary Organizations in Canada: Bridgers,Bonders, or Both?

Using a sample of 645 voluntary organizations in Canada, this study explores the differences between women’s voluntary organizations and gender-neutral organizations in their propensity to form a bridging or a bonding interorganizational relationship. The results suggest that not only do women’s organizations in Canada collaborate more than gender-neutral organizations, but also the tendency to have bridging or bonding relationships is significantly different. The factors predisposing women’s organizations to have collaborators inside or outside their network seems to be affected by how much the environmental changes in Canada impact their survival and whether the nature of the causes they support makes them an attractive partner. For gender-neutral organizations the tendency to bridge or bond seems to relate more to traditional organizational characteristics, such as size and staffing efficiency.     

Religious involvement, religious context, and self-assessed health in Europe

In the present study, the authors examine the extent to which effects of individual religious involvement on self-assessed health are influenced by the religious context (i.e., religious involvement at the country level). The authors test their expectations using individual level data (N = 127,257) on 28 countries from the European Social Surveys (2002-2008). Results of multilevel analyses show that individual religious attendance is positively related to self-assessed health in Europe. Protestants appear to feel healthier than Catholics. Moreover, modeling cross-level interactions demonstrates that religious denominations at the national level are influential: The health advantage of Protestants as compared to Catholics is greater as the percentage of Protestants in a country is higher, yet smaller as countries have a higher percentage of Catholics. The association between religious attendance and self-assessed health does not depend on the national level of religious attendance.     

Networking Through Loose and Strong Ties: An Australian Qualitative Study

Given the significant role attributed to community organizations by many social capital scholars, it is appropriate to investigate the dynamics of that process. In particular, Woolcock and Narayan (World Bank Res. Obs. 15(2): 225–249, 2000) have suggested that bridging and bonding are two different types of connections, whereby bridging is associated with loose ties across communities and bonding is associated with strong ties within a limited group. This qualitative study explores the loose and strong ties of 39 participants connected through community organizations in rural and urban New South Wales. The results suggest that loose and strong ties are not synonymous with bridging and bonding. In general loose and strong ties differ in degree rather than in kind and people prefer to bridge through their strong ties. The interesting exceptions were ties to professionals, which were highly trusted but defined as loose ties. It is suggested that a model for a high social capital society might be a chain of well-bonded groups each with strong links to some other groups.     

Religiosity and Child Sexual Abuse: A Risk Factor Assessment

ABSTRACT

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between religion and child sexual abuse. A self-report survey questionnaire was administered to 397 freshmen students at a southern university. The students were asked about several social background factors, including involvement with church and religious activities. They were also asked to disclose whether they had been sexually abused as a child. The present study found significant relationships between religiosity and victims of child sexual abuse by both relatives and non-relatives. Persons sexually abused by a relative were much more likely to be affiliated with fundamental Protestant religions. Persons sexually abused by a non-relative were much more likely to rarely or never be involved in church and religious activities and were affiliated with liberal religious denominations or indicated they were atheists or agnostics.     

Holding on to history and each other: The unexpected LGBTQ legacy of a Czech Holocaust survivor and a Torah scroll from her hometown

Abstract

A Czech Holocaust survivor rescued by a Kindertransport in 1939; a long-lost Torah scroll, rediscovered in 1964, from a Jewish community wiped out in World War II; a German American lesbian who converted to Judaism in 2001. Three disparate stories, unfolding decades apart, converge in one memorable encounter, a Kristallnacht commemoration in Los Angeles organized by Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), the world’s first LGBTQ synagogue, which leads to an enduring friendship and fresh insight into contemporary queer Jewish life. In this personal essay, longtime BCC member Sylvia Sukop interweaves history and autobiography to explore the beauty and power of ritual, the resonance of the “Choose life” passage in Deuteronomy that her congregation reads from its rescued Czech scroll every Yom Kippur, and the many forms that good deeds and survival can take. Progressive faith communities, the author suggests, and the traditions in which they are rooted make space to witness and affirm the fullness of one another’s humanity, bridging differences and fostering unexpected kinship in a brutally divisive world.     

The Ties That Divide: Bonding Social Capital,Religious Friendship Networks,and Political Tolerance among Evangelicals*

Previous research has overwhelmingly found that Evangelical Protestants are generally less tolerant of outsiders than those of other religious traditions such as Catholics or Mainline Protestants. Using data from the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, I examine the extent to which political tolerance is related to a bonding type of social capital that is typical of Evangelical Protestantism. Findings support most of the previous research into the relationship between religion and political tolerance, and support the hypothesis that social embeddedness within one’s congregation predicts intolerance among Evangelical Protestants, but not among those of other religious traditions. Implications for research into religious friendship networks and their potential dysfunctions are discussed.     

WWW.FAITH.ORG (Re)structuring communication and the social capital of religious organizations

This paper examines the relationships between Internet and social capital building within religious organizations, which are relatively understudied foci. Building upon theoretical insights provided by new institutionalism and recent research on the Internet, social capital and religion, this article explores the ways in which religious organizations have (re)structured their norms, values, and practices of religious community in light of the incorporation of the Internet into their congregational life. Drawing from interviews conducted with Christian and Buddhist religious leaders in Toronto, this article discusses three major relationships in which the effects of the Internet on social capital may be understood, that is, complementary, transformative, and perverse relationships. Religious organizations are traditionally associated with relatively high stocks of social capital, yet findings here suggest that their communicative norms, values, and practices are changing to a varying extent. The results also indicate that the relationship between the Internet and social capital building is largely complementary; however, the Internet is perceived by some to be a 'mixed blessing', facilitating the potential transformation of organizational practices that affect community norms while leading to the dispersion of religious ties that could undermine community solidarity. Thus, contrary to earlier studies that have documented no evidence of innovations involving the reconfiguration of organizational practices and the adjustment of mission or services, findings here illustrate how some religious organizations have expanded the scope of their calling and restructured their communicative practices to spur administrative and operational effectiveness. Like other organizations, religious organizations are not insulated from technological changes including those associated with the Internet. This study clarifies and identifies key ways in which the distinct spirituality, cultural values, and institutional practices and norms of religious organizations influence communication processes that constitute bridging and bonding forms of social capital in this dot.org era of faith.     

Migrants' social networks and weak ties: accessing resources and constructing relationships post‐migration

Within migration studies literature there is a tendency to assume that migrants have ready access to kin and friendship networks which facilitate the migration and settling processes. Through tight bonds of trust and reciprocity, these networks are considered to be sources of social capital, providing a counter‐balance to the disadvantages that migrants may encounter in the destination society. This paper argues that more attention is needed to the ways in which migrants access, maintain and construct different types of networks, in varied social locations, with diverse people. I suggest that the often simplistic dichotomy of bonding and bridging capital needs to be re‐appraised and instead offer an alternative way of thinking about these social ties. The distinction between them tends to be understood on the basis of the ethnicity of the people involved – bonding involves close ties with ‘people like us’ while bridging involves links beyond ‘group cleavages’. Insufficient attention has been paid to the actual resources flowing between these ties or the kinds of relationship developing between the actors involved. The nature of these social networks may be better understood by focusing on the relationship between the actors, their relative social location, and their available and realisable resources. Data from a qualitative study of Polish migrants in London is used to illustrate this approach.     

Analyzing the Impact of Bonding and Bridging Social Capital on Economic Well-Being: Results from Canada's General Social Survey

In this study we analyze nationally representative data from Canada's General Social Survey to investigate how various indicators of bonding and bridging social capital are associated with economic well-being and how the magnitude of their associations compare with each other. Our findings suggest that several dimensions of bonding social capital, including knowing neighbors well enough to ask favors of them and providing assistance to others, are positively associated with economic well-being. The study's indicators of bridging social capital were also linked to increases in the participants’ economic well-being. When comparing the associations of bonding and bridging social capital we ascertained that bridging social capital in the form of group membership, including Internet group membership and participation in groups, had a more robust association than any of the indicators of bonding social capital. We consider the implications of the study's findings in light of a technologically-advanced yet volatile economy.     

Does the Internet matter for strong ties? Bonding social capital,Internet use,and age-based inequality

As the Internet becomes pervasive in western societies, social capital emerges as a valuable sociological tool to analyze the social effects of Internet use. Thus, a growing body of research has been looking into the relationship between social capital and Internet usage. This research has been showing a positive relationship between them; however, results are not as conclusive when we consider one of the main dimensions of social capital: bonding. Bonding relates to resources that are embedded in one’s strong ties (i.e., family members and close friends). The study of bonding is of particular sociological interest, since the discussion around the social effects of the Internet still suggests that it takes time away from strong ties and that is more useful to connect with weak ties (i.e., acquaintances). This study examines the relationship between bonding and the Internet, using representative survey data and semi-structured interviews from Portugal. Findings show that bonding is predicted positively by Internet use but negatively by age. On one hand, the Internet seems to compensate for the negative age effect because older adults who use it are more likely to have a high level of bonding. On the other hand, the Internet reinforces accumulated social advantage.     

“We're gonna get you through it”: The role of bonding social capital in the development of bridging social capital

Many programs that place low-income students of color in high-achieving college preparatory high schools seek to nurture bridging social capital, connections across class lines that provide leverage in the process of “getting ahead.” Bonding social capital, which focuses more on emotional support and “getting by,” is frequently characterized as less useful for social mobility. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with alumni from one such program, we challenge the notion of bridging and bonding social capital as discrete, countervailing forms of social capital, and demonstrate how the two may complement each other. Specifically, we find that bonding social capital served as a critical resource that students drew upon as they navigated their elite high schools in the face of racism and classism. In doing so, this bonding social capital ultimately facilitated the development of bridging social capital by encouraging student persistence at these institutions. Our findings support critiques of traditional accounts of social capital that devalue the capital possessed by marginalized communities and fuel deficit ideologies. Furthermore, they highlight the personal costs that youth may face in the pursuit of bridging capital, complicating the narrative of social mobility as an unmitigated good.     

“I Really Belong Here”: Civic Capacity-Building among Returning Citizens

This article focuses on unlikely movement actors whose civic engagement has been understudied: people with criminal records (“returning citizens”). We present findings from 18 months of ethnographic research with members (leaders) of Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE), a civic group led by returning citizens. FORCE leaders received institutional support from Community Renewal Society (CRS), a larger faith and community-based organization, to lead a rights reform movement in Chicago. Findings suggest that FORCE leaders constructed notions of kinship, recognition, and power through civic capacity-building efforts—and that social belonging was core to such capacity-building efforts. While bonding social belonging occurred as FORCE leaders formed kinship with people facing similar social and economic marginality, bridging social belonging emerged as leaders felt recognized by CRS staff organizers, affiliates, and elected officials. Bonding and bridging social belonging enabled FORCE leaders, who faced constant social exclusion in society, to experience much needed kinship, recognition, and power. Future studies should continue to uncover how local capacity-building processes have life-changing relational effects on movement participants from socially and economically marginalized groups.     

How to make head or tail of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’?: addressing the methodological ambiguity1

A distinction has recently been proposed between bridging (or encompassing) and bonding (or inward-looking) social networks. However, existing theoretical contributions remain vague as to the fundamental meaning of both concepts. As a consequence, two distinct interpretations have developed alongside each other. In the present paper, we employ data on voluntary association membership in Flanders to empirically illustrate that both approaches can lead to substantially different outcomes and therefore appear to tap into different dimensions of bridging versus bonding. These findings underline the problematic nature of the current conceptual ambiguity. We conclude that should the bridging/bonding distinction add meaningfully to our understanding of the external effects of social networks, it is essential to resolve the conceptual and methodological imprecision.