Measuring Social Capital Accounting for Nested Data and Subnetworks Within Schools

• Published in: Social indicators research Vol. 126; no. 3; pp. 1189 - 1207
• Main Authors: Condon, Meghan, Lavery, Lesley, Engle, Par Jason
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Science + Business Media 01.04.2016; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Child Development; Community Involvement; Construct Validity; Cultural capital; Differential analysis; Discriminant analysis; Education; Extracurricular activities; Factor Analysis; Human Geography; Microeconomics; Parent Surveys; Parents & parenting; Participation; Predictive Validity; Public Health; Quality of Life Research; Schools; Social capital; Social Networks; Social research; Social Science Research; Social Sciences; Social Structure; Sociology; Studies; Teaching Methods; Validity; United States > US; Social networks; Factor analysis; Education; Schools; Social capital
• ISSN: 0303-8300; 1573-0921
• DOI: 10.1007/s11205-015-0945-2

Social capital is a central concept in social science research, and it is measured in diverse ways. Few measurement approaches take the network structure of complex institutional settings into account. In this study, using data from a large-scale school-based randomized field trial, we develop several factor analytic models to test the validity and reliability of a new survey battery capturing multiple dimensions of social capital in such settings. We demonstrate that it is important to account for institutional and network structure in social capital measures, and we show how social capital can be operationalized as the shared variance between different relational characteristics in complex settings with multiple subnetworks.