Social Capital Among Volunteers : A case study on the collective action of international volunteers during Europe’s refugee crisis

Abstract: This study is based on theories on how social capital can lead to collective action in the case of the international volunteers active during Europe’s refugee crisis. The purpose of the study is to investigate if previous research on social capital can explain why people came together from different countries to support the people seeking refuge in Europe in late year 2015 and early year 2016. Thus, the study is based on a theory-consuming method, using triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis to determine if the volunteers’ levels of social networks or social trust can explain the action that was taken in this specific case. The results show that the volunteers studied in this paper have high levels of social capital, in regards to both social trust and social networks through the quantitative analysis. The high levels of activity in social networks were furthermore confirmed through the qualitative analysis of the volunteers’ own comments to why they decided to volunteer. The conclusions are that the volunteers are showing signs of creating bridging social capital between them through the activity in their social networks, that the higher levels of trust in other people shown in the results can help them to over-come collective action problems, and that the hypothesis of that high levels of social capital should have facilitated collective action also in this specific case is considered confirmed for the volunteers responding to the survey.