Team Resilience
Types of Connections
Our respondents self-identified their connections by sector type. Some connections only fit into one sector, but others involved more than one. Because some connections fit into more than one sector, the bars are not proportional to each other. However, the pie graphs below each graph are proportional; they represent how many connections out of the total number of connections fall into each sector.
This is a great tool to measure progress in Vermont's resilience. These sectors are common in management plans that already exist (e.g., Resilient Vermont's Draft Reccomendations and Resilience Report). By utilizing data, we can measure Vermont's success in achieving the goals set out by these management plans.
Connection Strength
For the four most common sectors we analyzed the responses by strength. A strength of 1 indicates that people have connected, for example, at a town meeting. A strength of 2 indicates that the individuals made that initial connection into an ongoing partnership. A strength of 3 indicates that people have either completed or are currently taking concrete action together.
This analysis is important because it ties connectivity directly to concrete changes in Vermont. This is a great tool to measure the effectiveness of our partnerships. The majority of the connections we gathered data on were strong. This is likely because those are the connections people are most proud of and, therefore, the ones they talked about most in interviews and the survey.
Social Capital: Bridging vs. Bonding
Bridging capital links people from different sectors, while bonding capital connects people who are working in the same sector. Read about the importance of bridging and bonding capital under the "Resilience" tab.
We categorized our connections into bridging or bonding capital by looking at the self-identified sectors of each connection. Relationships that only fit into one sector where determined to build bonding capital, while those that were identified with more than one sector were determined to build bridging capital. As with sectors and strength, this provides one more measure to assess social capital in Vermont.