In educational research families’ socio-economic status is usually operationalized according to Bourdieu’s (1986) theory, in which he differentiates economic, cultural and social capital. For the empirical measurement of economic and cultural capital there is a multitude of well-tested indicators that researchers can rely on. For social capital there are only few such indicators. A new approach to measure social capital was proposed by van der Gaag and Snijders (2005). The ‘resource generator’ is a scale for standardized questionnaires which consists of a list of 36 resources and activities that others can provide to assist a person, e.g. “someone handy to repair household equipment” (van der Gaag & Snijders, 2005, p. 12). For every resource respondents are asked to state whether they know someone who can provide them with the resource in question. In this paper we will present results from an application of the ‘resource generator’ in the Trends in International Science and Mathematics Study 2015 (TIMSS) in Germany (Wendt, Bos, Selter, Köller, Schwippert & Kasper, 2016) and show how social capital measured with this scale relates to students’ achievement (n = 2470). A preliminary Latent Class Analysis (Lazarsfeld & Henry, 1968) shows that we can identify five groups of parents. They differ with regard to the kind of support others can provide them with, i.e. if the support is of a more practical or a more academic nature. In further analyses we will analyze how the groups we identified correlate with other indicators of social status, e.g. parents’ education or books at home. Using hierarchical linear models we also plan to show how much variance in students’ achievement can be explained by social capital measured with the ‘resource generator’, when Bourdieu’s (1986) other forms of capital, i.e. economic and cultural capital, are controlled for.

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