Measuring social capital at the neighbourhood level: Experimental estimates of sense of belonging to the local community measured at the Census Tract Level

Statistics Canada continues to use a variety of data sources to provide neighbourhood-level variables across an expanding set of domains, such as sociodemographic characteristics, income, services and amenities, crime, and the environment. Yet, despite these advances, information on the social aspects of neighbourhoods is still unavailable. In this paper, answers to the Canadian Community Health Survey on respondents’ sense of belonging to their local community were pooled over the four survey years from 2016 to 2019. Individual responses were aggregated up to the census tract (CT) level. The small area estimation component of the Generalized Estimation System developed at Statistics Canada was then used to produce more efficient estimates of average community belonging within CTs than the estimates obtained from standard survey-weighted methods alone. For most areas, the small area estimate has a smaller coefficient of variation than the direct estimate; the difference is particularly notable for the areas with the smallest sample sizes. The bivariate and multivariate correlations between CT-level community belonging and seven other CT-level characteristics are also presented. CT-level estimates of community belonging are found to be correlated as expected with other CT-level variables, such as population density, population turnover, housing tenure and crime.