Structural Effects on Individual Social Capital: The Influence of Local Occupational Compositions

• In Event: 1454 - Social Capital and Social Institutions

Abstract

Recent research has increasingly focused on how position-generated network resources vary by an individual’s demographic and socioeconomic background. Network researchers, however, have largely overlooked macro-level factors, such as occupational structures, that may be equally important in distinguishing who has better access to position-specific social connections. By integrating data from two national surveys conducted in the United States, the Social Capital Survey and the American Community Survey, we explore the extent to which position-generated individual social capital fluctuates by local occupational compositions at the county, metropolis, and state levels. Multilevel analyses show that in counties where more residents work in education, training, and library occupations and in management occupations, one has a greater likelihood of finding professional-type resources. Similar structural effects also apply to the case of accessing resources embedded in farming and production occupations, but these effects turn out to be less evident in the service and management and administrative sectors. Not only does the association between individual networked resources and local occupational structure vary across different occupations, but the magnitude of such structural effects differs by the scope of geographical areas. The findings underscore how contextual factors and geographical location may contribute to building occupation-specific network resources. By exploring such effects of occupational compositions, this study also raises methodological issues that pose a fundamental challenge to survey studies using the position generator to measure individual social capital.

Authors

• Yang-chih Fu, Academia Sinica Taiwan

• Hui-Ju Kuo, Academia Sinica Taiwan