Social Associations

Strong and supportive social networks help residents to be resilient during difficult times. Social associations are a useful proxy for social capital, networks of relationships and trust among people in a community. Social capital is a particularly important resource for people living in multidimensional poverty who have limited access to many other resources. Social connections can help those in poverty find solutions for the problems they face obtaining transportation, child care, and housing.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 14th among its peer cities with approximately 10 associations per 10,000 residents.

Louisville is in the bottom tier of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.

Trends Over Time

The rate of social associations relative to the population in Louisville was steadily decreasing from 2000 to 2011 but has remained relatively constant between 2011 and 2017. This decreasing trend is similar to the overall trend observed in Louisville’s peer cities, although Louisville has fallen below the 25th percentile of its peers.

Comparison between the Most and Least Improved Peer Cities

Since 2000, Grand Rapids saw its number of membership organizations remain constant, while the number of membership associations in Greensboro decreased greatly.

Continue Exploring with Related Data

Homeownership

Multidimensional Poverty

Preventable Hospital Stays

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.