The impact of social capital in socio-emotional competencies of Spanish and immigrant adolescents from the Southeast of Spain

ABSTRACT

How important is the role that the different social institutions play in adolescents’ emotional development? This study alludes to the social capital framework to explain the influence that the family, school and peer relations have on the social-emotional competencies (SEC) of adolescents, immigrants and locals living in Southeastern Spain. Three social capital and socio-emotional competencies assessments scales were used in the study with 1614 pupils from 7 secondary schools. The results show that: (1) The social capital is a predictive and explanatory factor in adolescence. (2) The social relations that influence the SEC the most are those developed at school, followed by peer relations and, lastly, the family. (3) Spanish and Romanian teenagers show higher social capital and more SEC than Moroccans. (4) There are SEC gender differences among the Spanish group. (5) An immigrant school puzzle is observed in the Moroccan teenagers group who value school the most. (6) The family’s low emotional influence, particularly among Moroccan women, suggests that there is a deterioration of the institution and the existence of inter-generational differences. According to the results, schools remain a privileged space for SEC intervention programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social capital
• socio-emotional competencies
• cross-cultural education
• immigrants
• adolescents

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the collaboration of Professor Ana Isabel Sanz García from Ipsias Institute, Spain and Professor Carmen Montecinos from the University of Valparaiso, Chile for their illuminating comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Encarnación Soriano-Ayala, Professor of Research Methods in Education at the University of Almería (Spain) and director of the research group “Research and Evaluation in Intercultural Education”. She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on issues of intercultural education, cultural identity, intercultural citizenship, and interculturality and gender.

Verónica C. Cala, Lecturer in Research Methods at the University of Almería (Spain) and member of the “Research and Evaluation in Intercultural Education”. She was licensed in Medicine and Surgery at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research areas are focused on transcultural health education; migrant adolescent health; intercultural education and research methods in health education.

Notes

1. The measures of sample adequacy revealed a good fit to the data (KMO (Kaiser, Meyer and Olkin) = .821; Bartlett’s sphericity test: χ²= 5857.06, p < .001), which indicates that the scale was factorable. Factor analysis with varimax rotation yielded five factors with Eigenvalues higher than 1, which explained 53.96% of the total variance. The first factor explained 14.26% of the variance, the second factor explained 10.82% of the variance, the third factor explained 9.87% the variance, the fourth factor explained 9.80% the variance and the fifth factor explained 9.21% the variance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National R+D Plan of the Ministry of Economy and Competivity of Spain under grant [Ref: EDU2011-26887]: ‘Education for Cross-cultural Health in Immigrant and Native Adolescents from Almeria: Analysis and intervention for optimization and improvement’ and Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación.