Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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The growth of social capital: Longitudinal measures and findings |
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| Convenor | Dr Jon Miller (University of Michigan) |
In recent years, the concept of social capital has become a critical part of social science inquiry, but the construct is assessed by a variety of measures. This session will include papers that describe the core components of the social capital construct and specific measures used in different national longitudinal studies. To the extent possible, papers will compare two or more longitudinal studies rather than describe a single longitudinal study.
In a parallel but unrelated process, there are a number of national longitudinal studies -- usually of children, adolescents, and young adults -- in Europe, Australia, Korea, and the United States that have collected measures of social capital. In many cases, the results of the measurement of social capital have been embedded in large comprehensive reports, but this session will encourage the analysis of social capital as a separate construct and encourage papers that describe and discuss the results of these longitudinal measures.
Preference will be given to papers that include both a discussion of the measures of social capital and their findings about the growth, retention, and use of social capital in various societies. Although this session will focus on only social capital, we hope that it may be a paradigm for other sessions in the future that will seek to combine methodological and substantive discussions in integrated analyses.
In 2008, a social cohesion framework has been developed at Statistics Netherlands. Elaborating on the conceptual frameworks on both social capital and social cohesion, the following three dimensions are distinguished: (1) Participation; (2) Trust; and (3) Integration. The two building blocks for measuring social capital - participation and trust (Van Beuningen and Schmeets, 2012) - are extended with a third dimension: 'integration'. The three dimensions jointly create the framework of social cohesion.
Based on large-scale surveys (e.g. Labour Force Surveys (n=831,109), Permanent Survey on Living Conditions (n=311,438, European Social Survey (n=9,741)) and (population) registers, we investigate the development of: (a) Social contacts, informal help and volunteering; (b) Political participation (turnout and participation in political actions); (c) Social, institutional and political trust. Overall, we found that most participation and trust levels have increased. However, there are large gaps between prevailing groups in Dutch society, in particular between lower and higher educated, natives and ethnic minorities, and various religious groups. Such gaps are rather stable for participation (since 1997) and trust (since 2002) (Schmeets and Te Riele, 2012). We aim to extend the time-span, by including (a) the Survey on Living Conditions 1974-1996; and (b) recent data from 2011 and 2012.
Van Beuningen, J. & H. Schmeets (2012) Developing a Social Capital Index for the Netherlands, Social Indicators Research. DOI: 10.1007/s11205-012-0129-2
Schmeets, H. & S. te Riele (2013) Declining social cohesion in The Netherlands? Social Indicators Research (forthcoming).
Using the 25 year record of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth, this analysis will present an operational measure of social capital, monitor its development during the two decades after the completion of secondary schooling, and present a structural equation model to predict the level of social capital held by each of the 4,000 young adults that continue to participate in this study. In broad terms, there is a moderately strong relationship between formal educational attainment, professional employment, and family (marriage and children) in the acquisition and maintenance of social capital. The paper will set the development period in the context of the human development literature and discuss the implications of these results (participants are now 37-40 years of age) for the quality of life and for aging.
Youth unemployment is pervasive in all EU countries, and can have long-lasting detrimental effects. Previous work suggests that the probability of unemployment is higher for youths whose parents themselves have previous unemployment spells. The literature has not focused on specifically researching the mechanisms through which parental unemployment may influence their children's labour market outcomes. This paper focuses on the role parental social networks play in this relationship.
Unemployed parents may have fewer contacts they can call upon to help their children get a job. Having unemployed parents is then a comparative disadvantage while looking for a job and thus lead to longer unemployment spells. We look at monthly labour market histories for young adults in the German Socio-economic Panel Study from 1984 to 2010 to investigate this. Different forms of parental unemployment are used to model the timing of the effect and parental social capital is measured in two distinct ways. We contrast three methods of exploring the effect of parental unemployment on the duration of their children's unemployment spells. We find that parental unemployment not only lowers the probability of finding a job but also renders the parental social capital useless to the unemployed youth. This shows that parental unemployment should not be studied alone but we should look at the different mechanisms through which it can affect their children. We contrast our event history model with an econometric approach put forward by Gottschalk (1996) and with added latent variables to deal with unobserved heterogeneity.