ABSTRACT
The social capital has become very popular in scientific analyses. In a neighbourhood with lower social capital, where the neighbours do not know or trust one another, the mother would either have to walk with her child to the park or hire someone to do it for her. Collective efficacy or trust and shared social norms are latent characteristics of a neighbourhood measured by judgements or scales presented to the residents. One methodological problem in research on social capital in neighbourhoods is measuring the collective attribute 'collective efficacy' of a neighbourhood using individual data. In Germany, Jürgen Friedrichs and Blasius conducted 430 interviews with residents in four deprived neighbourhood in Cologne. They found the extent of social deprivation of the neighbourhoods to be negatively correlated to the size of social networks, and found that the larger the network of a person the less that person accepted deviant norms.
