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Rapid Overview
Centre for Thriving Places were commissioned to deliver a rapid review to answer the following:
● What quantitative evaluation research, using a pre-post design, has been carried out to assess the effects of wellbeing programmes and interventions on neighbourhood belonging, the strength of social support networks and community cohesion?
● What is the strength of evidence of the evaluation research?
● What are the key findings from the research?
What emerged from the process of undertaking the review, as well as in the narrative summary of included studies, was that there were 27 studies that met this research question (the effects of wellbeing programmes on the three outcomes of social capital). Studies that were returned in the searches and were excluded fell into the following categories: wrong outcome, particularly social capital outcomes being intermediary outcomes; wrong measurement; wrong methodology (particularly where there was only one measurement point). Those studies that do exist are hard to meaningfully summarise because of the heterogeneity of measures, intervention types and populations.
Interventions included in the review were comprised of youth skills programmes, health interventions of multiple types -for older people, substance abuse treatment patients and deprived communities, social capital interventions from facilitated group activities to policy targets, and finally urban renewal infrastructure programmes. We were not able to draw out any conclusions about what types of interventions are contributing to changes within individuals in communities.
There were two types of intervention for which more than one high quality study found significant increases in cohesion and/or social support. The first was regular group tai chi practice. In both cases the tai chi intervention groups had higher social support scores at follow up than the control groups. The second was the National Citizen Service (NCS) youth skills programmes; the six NCS evaluations included in the review, being relatively homogenous in terms of intervention, target population, quality and study design, offered more scope than the rest of the studies for drawing more robust conclusions. All five that measured the cohesion outcome reported a significantly higher increase in cohesion scores for the standard summer interventions compared to the comparison groups, suggestingthese summer youth skills programmes are effective at improving cohesion among participants. Most of the NCS evaluations also reported a significantly higher increase in social support scores for the summer test and standard interventions compared to their respective comparison groups, although there were a couple of exceptions.
The review identified 27 studies and evaluation reports for inclusion, from a longlist of nearly 4,000. The findings provided insight into how these social capital domains are conceptualised and measured but synthesis of the results was challenging due to the limited volume of studies and the heterogeneity of measures, intervention types and populations.