The Social Audit Cookbook: recipes for auditing the way we connect - by Eva Cox.

Are you trying to influence social change? This cookbook is for community activists and provides a practical guide to the 'what' and 'how' of social auditing and measuring social capital.

The Social Audit Cookbook, has been Funded by the Lance Reichstein Foundation as a contribution to community groups wanting to use surveys and audits as part of processes of social change. It has been prepared by Eva Cox, University of Technology Sydney.

We may argue about what we define as a good society but, mostly, we agree that our societies could be made better than they are. This cookbook is designed to help you contribute to that process by carrying out social audits to find out how your part of society works.

It's called a Cookbook because it offers recipes and ingredients for carrying out social auditing. Using these measures, together with the more conventional ones also included, community based researchers should be able to show how well communities work, not just describe their economic or material characteristics.

This cookbook is for community activists who want to produce research reports to support submissions, lobbying and other forms of social action.

The cookbook is not intended to be politically or socially neutral. It is being offered to community groups and others who want to use it as a contribution to making our social systems more able to deal with the consequences of current political decisions. It is based on the premise that we need to promote the importance of certain types of social links in making our society more equitable (the fair go), respectful of diversity and able to argue civilly, and irrepressibly, about our conflicts.

This cookbook aims to give you a variety of recipes for social research. It contains a broad selection of ingredients that can be used to create a research design that suits your particular needs for measuring how people are connecting in your community.

The suggested measures will also be useful in finding out more about areas of need in the community and looking at the connections and relationships which create or undermine social capital.

You will find here new ideas and measures of social well being which offer alternatives to the economic or more quantitative results-focused statistics used by most official bodies.

Such ideas and measures will then strengthen your ability to argue with funding bodies based on social indicators rather than purely economic ones.

Contents

THE SOCIAL AUDIT COOKBOOK: RECIPES FOR AUDITING THE WAY WE CONNECT

Before we begin

• The good society
• Who is the Cookbook for?
• Why a cookbook?
• The contents
• Acknowledgements

PART ONE

ESTABLISHING THE MENU

Introduction to social auditing
Auditing social processes
Is social capital a useful idea?
Trust
Looking for signs of social capital
      Characteristics of high level social capital
      Characteristics of low level social capital
Looking further
      Some more on social capital debates

PART TWO

CHOOSING INGREDIENTS

1. Designing the audits

Designing the data collection
Methods of measurement
A checklist for designing an audit

Make sure you use all three types of collection modes

Make reliable findings

Provide internal checks on consistency and validity of the data Methods of Data Collection
Doing surveys and collecting information
Listening, observing and conversing

2. Collecting new data: Equipment and ingredients

Equipment

The survey

Group exercises

Ingredients: Sample questions for surveys

Trust

Perceptions of inequality and how these have changed over time

Civic trust

Individualism and co-operation

Locus of control

Living with other people

Support and interdependency

Inclusion, exclusion and others

Involvement

Barriers

Types of Participation

Formal membership of social groups

Political involvement

Local media

Use of public and local facilities

Social and political attitudes

Demographics
Using observation
3. Traditional social indicators

4. Collating and analysing the research material

Dealing with questionnaires
       Reporting on focus groups or group interviews
       How to do the group analysis
       Putting it together
5. Reporting results

Drawing conclusions from social audits

6. Basic research - for experts and novices

Open Questions

Problems

Closed Questions

Pre-coding

Varieties of closed questions

Filter questions How to avoid putting bias into your questions

How to avoid getting unusable answers

Double barrelled questions

Broad questions

Other questionnaire design considerations

Questionnaire flow and question order

How to pick a sample: From random to purposive

Running a focus group

In-depth interviews

Creating a problem tree for a community issue

Resource allocations

Mapping

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