The role of social capital in the explanation of educational success and educational inequalities

Abstract

This article examines the role that social capital plays in school success and in the explanation of social and ethnic inequalities in the German educational system. Based on Coleman's well-known concept of social capital, different aspects of social capital are distinguished, including social network composition, parent–school interaction and intrafamilial social capital. In sum, the overall results indicate that the different aspects of social capital influence the school performance of pupils. In addition, social capital endowment is found to be of relevance for the explanation of inequalities in school grades between social classes and ethnic groups. In this respect, the analyses indicate that social capital endowment is part of the underlying mechanism responsible for educational inequalities.

Keywords:

• social capital
• social networks
• school success
• educational inequality
• ethnic inequality

Acknowledgements

The article is based on research supported by the Framework Programme for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant: 01JG1053). I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article.

Notes on contributor

Tobias Roth is an assistant lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Germany. He also works as a research assistant at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, Germany. His research interests include educational inequalities, educational decision-making and social capital.

Notes

1. As in many other studies, grades could not be measured via official school reports, but I have to rely on information from the mothers which might lead to some social desirability bias. Additional analyses which show that grades are strongly correlated with achievement test scores carried out in wave one make me confident that this is not a serious problem.

2. The few cases in which the mother and her partner were born in different countries were excluded from the analyses.

3. Individual scores are estimated via a regression method (Cronbach's alpha = 0.81).