Facebook Social Connectedness Index

Anonymized snapshot of all active Facebook users and their friendship networks to measure the intensity of connectedness between locations. The Social Connectedness Index (SCI) is a measure of the social connectedness between different geographies. Specifically, it measures the relative probability that two individuals across two locations are friends with each other on Facebook.

Details on the underlying data and the construction of the index are provided in the “Facebook Social Connectedness Index - Data Notes.pdf” file. Please also see https://dataforgood.facebook.com/ as well as the associated research paper “Social Connectedness: Measurement, Determinants and Effects,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.3.259).

Region identifiers are taken from GADM v2.8 https://gadm.org/download_country_v2.html. Future versions will update IDs to be compatible with the newest GADM version.