Recreation, Informal Social Networks and Social Capital‪.‬

Introduction In the past decade the concept of social capital has been applied to an increasingly large number of fields to explain outcomes such as educational attainment, health status, economic prosperity, crime rates, and democratic participation (see for example, Lin, 2001; Putnam, 2000; Stolle & Hooghe, 2004). Its wider use is valuable in its recognition of the importance of social ties and interpersonal connections in the contemporary world. However, its extension has resulted in loss of analytic precision as the concept has come to carry different meanings as it is employed in disparate theoretical traditions (Fine, 2001). Moreover, and partly as a consequence, there is considerable disagreement about how the processes which generate the effects attributed to social capital operate.