Social cohesion and connectivity in Flanders

The aim of this research is to give an overview of the evolution of formal as well as informal social networks in Flanders. The analyses show that the amount of members of almost all kind of organisations is grown. The increase is especially due to the growing success of sport clubs. Further, we try to find out the societal developments that have played a part in the evolution of the associational life. We investigate also which different social groups participate more or less over time. These social groups are the higher educated people, the catholic people who do not go to church on a regular basis and the older people. Concerning the informal contacts, we see that the very frequent informal contacts are decreased over time, the less frequent contacts came in place. The formal as well as the informal social networks stay unequally divided in the population. The most important difference is that lower educated respondents have more informal contacts, the higher educated respondents are more often engaged in associations.