Replication Data for: Japanese Social Capital and Social Vulnerability Indices: Measuring Drivers of Community Resilience 2000-2017

Recently, scholars have turned to publicly available data to measure the resources and vulnerability of communities in the face of disasters (Kyne & Aldrich 2019, Cutter et al. 2003). In the past, scholars relied on custom surveys to measure social capital, but this was costly or unfeasible to conduct for every community in a country. Despite suffering numerous disasters in the last thirty years, Japanese disaster scholarship lacks municipality-level measures of social capital and social vulnerability. This study uses principal component analysis and validation techniques to develop new bonding, bridging, and linking social capital indices, paired with a new social vulnerability index, available for each of Japan’s 1741 municipalities. Scholars and policymakers can directly apply this index to evaluate the social capital or vulnerability of specific communities, compare across multiple communities, or model their effect of outcomes.