A Look at the 2015 NC Civic Health Index

How healthy is civic life in North Carolina? Unlike testing blood pressure, or logging exercise time as measures of physical health, making a measure of civic connectedness and activity is tricky. The NCSU Institute for Emerging Issues took on this effort by producing the NC Civic Health Index, 2015. The report identifies “broad lessons” based on comparing North Carolina’s civic health to national data. It highlights “trends and divides” for subgroups – especially youth and racial and ethnic minority groups — having lower measures than older, Caucasian NC residents, and concludes with a “Call to Action.” Since the Index surveys the whole state, there are certain to be varying results from community to community. Just because some things may look better than the national average, we probably still have plenty of areas to improve (i.e., get out and exercise more!). The four kinds of measures in the civic index are: interaction with neighbors volunteering and donating confidence in institutions and group participation. Notice that the index looks at different things ranging from individual activities (e.g. charitable donations) to group connections. It also measures confidence in institutions, which is a complex way to measure civic health. While we may want to have confidence in certain institutions, it is a two-way street. It is hard to overlook media or government poor performance or big errors. Confidence will suffer. How to think about civic health Civic vitality depends on trust, activity and connectedness. Part of our U.S. history celebrates individual liberty, and people not being constrained by the crowd. In the best of [...]