Melbourne, Australia, meanwhile examined community garden membership and in their
case identified a lack of diversity in ethnic groups and social classes. The interaction
between members was also limited. Both of these studies advocated further research into
community gardens using social capital.
One of the commonly debated issues in the social capital literature more generally is the
question of how social capital is measured and detected. In fact, there is no widely agreed
consensus on how to measure or assess social capital (Roberts and Roche 2001). There are
obvious challenges when it comes to measuring a complex concept which is typified by
abstract human relations such as trust, obligations and reciprocity. One of the most commonly
accepted ways to measure social capital is to focus on issues around trust and
civic participation, counting, for example, formal membership of voluntary organisations.
Such approaches, including the one employed by Kingsley and Townsend (2006) to
examine community gardens in Toronto, privilege a survey design methodological rationale,
which essentially aggregates survey responses into a grand mean, but in doing so makes
“it difficult to distinguish the impact of localised social contexts on the generation of social
capital” (Glover 2004, p. 144). Following Glover (2004), this paper employs a qualitative
methodology to understand social capital in community garden contexts.
Methodology