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Abstract
There are numerous indirect ways in which socioeconomic status (SES) can advantage or disadvantage people in developing social capital. Specifically, SES affects the access individuals have to beneficial resources that indirectly affects the social capital benefits individuals receive from personal and group social networks. With the advent of social network sites like Facebook, the ability to quantify and measure the effects of SES on social capital benefits is possible to a much greater degree than ever before. This study of undergraduate students focuses on the relationship between SES and social capital. We examine the relationship between SES and three structural measures of students' social capital using online social network data: general social capital (network size), bridging social capital (number of clusters), and bonding social capital (average degree). According to our results, higher SES relates to larger and denser networks, but not to networks with more clusters. These findings suggest that SES is not related to greater opportunities for networking, but better capitalization of existing network contexts. In addition to the novel substantive contribution, this paper offers a methodological advance in the structural study of social capital, which has previously been limited in size or complexity due to recall.
Notes
Cronbach's alpha (α) measures the degree of covariance amongst a set of indicators while penalizing the index for variance of individual items that is unrelated to that covariance (Cortina Citation1993). Our use of Cronbach's alpha should be interpreted as informative of the level of covariance observed, not as a critical test of reliability. Logically, we should not expect these measures to be perfectly correlated because our indicators represent actual empirical variables (living arrangements, receipt of subsidized school lunch, etc.), and thus deviations from perfect covariance represent empirical variation in levels of SES.