Facilitating Social Capital In Sport-Recreation Clubs: Analyzing The Relationships Using Dematel

As a key element in the sport-related domains, social capital is a completely known issue. As one of the most important community-oriented environments, the sport-recreation clubs have now turned into unique focal points for the facilitation of social capital. Accordingly, the study at hand was carried out first to extract and then to analyze the relationships of the factors facilitating social capital in sport-recreation clubs. This study was done using a sequential mixed-methods approach. In the qualitative phase, a systematic review was used to collect data, and in the quantitative phase, a questionnaire based on the multi-criteria decision making method (in fact, the expert DEAMTEL questionnaire) was used to this end. The results of the systematic review showed that the five factors of trust, friendly environment, horizontal governance, common goals, and norms are the significant patterns of social capital facilitation. Among these factors, the horizontal governance has the strongest effect, followed by friendly environment, trust, common goals, and norms. According to the cause-effect diagram, norms and horizontal governance were shown to be causal factors and friendly environment, trust, and common goals to be non-causal factors. The extracted semantic patterns can form a distinctive conceptual model/instrument for sport-recreation clubs to help them fully enjoy social capital and the benefits related to it.