The expression “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is a core summary of the established knowledge about social capital (Woolcock & Narayan, 2000, s.225). Since social capital has been shown to provide benefits for both the individual and community, this study aims to examine how young people in Sweden relate to friendships and civic engagement. The study is carried out through quantitative analyses of a survey from 2014, that was published in the book "Unga och religion: Troende, ointresserade eller neutrala" (Klingenberg & Lövheim, 2019, s.203-213). Groups of young people are divided first based on how they describe their upbringing conditions from a social perspective, second based on the young people's approach to religion and religiosity. Furthermore, the study examines possible connections between the respondents’ social background, friendship, social commitment, and non-profit involvement. The theoretical concepts of social capital and religious capital will be described, and then used in order to shed light on the connections that are discovered. The aim of the study is to nuance the knowledge about young people's community involvement and the connections that can be defined with the help of the concepts of social capital and religious capital. In the results of this study, social capital is revealed in the relationships between young people’s friendships and their descriptions of upbringing conditions from a social perspective. Religious capital is revealed in the relationships between personal approach to religion and non-profit work, as well as between religious commitment and non-profit work. At the same time, there were no statistical connections either between social capital and non-profit work, or between religious capital and developed friendships, which was unexpected based on previous research and is a possible subject for further studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-432177 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Sörner, Christine |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Religionssociologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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