Social Cohesion Radar – Measuring Common Ground. An International Comparison of Social Cohesion Codebook

Summary:

The publication offers an assessment of the degree of social cohesion in 34 advanced societies in four time periods from 1989 to 2012. This codebook accompanies the data set that we created to measure social cohesion and its nine dimensions.

Despite its recent emergence as a hot topic in academic and public discourse, social cohesion has only been addressed in a somewhat piecemeal fashion – both in academic research and existing social reporting initiatives – following no unified approach, which has led to a fragmentary collection of knowledge on the topic. With the ongoing social reporting initiative of the Bertelsmann Foundation and the concrete study to which this codebook relates, we attempt to close the existing gap. Particularly in times of growing income inequality, increasing social cleavages and exclusion, individualism, diminishing local identification, increasing migration, and growing ethnic and cultural diversity, a structured approach to social cohesion will be beneficial to a better understanding of the issue.

We publish the codebook, the dataset, and the related methods report to assist our readers and potential students of social cohesion in finding all information needed to understand the construc-tion of its dimensions and indices, as published in the actual report. We attempt to our best to deliver this information in a transparent, useful, and easily accessible way.

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