A Study of a Growth Process of Community-Based Organizations using a Social Network Analysis

本研究试图利用社会网络方法，评价旨在振兴人口减少的农村社区的以社区为基础的组织的发展过程，并提高其在社区中的重要性。它采用了一种方法，结合名称生成器和资源生成器的既定方法来衡量社会资本，并根据其成员向社区提供资源的程度来估计组织的重要性。结果表明，与非成员相比，组织成员作为资源提供者的依赖程度明显更高，他们在社区生活的年数或他们在其他地方出生的事实并不影响他们为他人提供资源的能力。这可能表明，这些组织可以成为从其他地区迁入的人在社区内获得信任和尊重并融入社会的有用工具。

This study attempted to appraise the process that community-based organizations aimed towards regeneration of a depopulating rural community has grown and increased their importance within the community, using a social network approach. It employed an approach that combined the established methods of Name Generator and Resource Generator to measure social capital, and estimated the importance of the organizations in terms of the extent to which their members provided resources to the community. The result showed that the members of the organizations were significantly more relied upon as resource providers compared to nonmembers, and the number of years they lived in the community or the fact that they were born somewhere else did not affect their ability to provide resources for others. This might suggest that those organizations could be useful vehicles for those who moved in from other areas to acquired trust and respect within the community and become integrated.