Since  seminal works by  Bourdieu (1986) and Coleman (1988) on the conception of social capital, a large  number of educational studies have been  conducted to test the effects of social capital. However, most of these studies were conducted by  the US-based researchers and based on  the US data. This may compromise the  generality of social capital  theory, because social capital is largely culturally dependent (Ream, 2003).  Moreover,  the previous studies mainly focused on the family-based social capital. As a result,  school-based social capital is understudied.  In this study,  we   make use of  [1]PISA 2009  data of 14 countries, to do a cross-country comparative study on the effects of both family-based and school-based social capital through country-specific  hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) to test cross-country differences in  the effects of both family-based and school-based social capital.

Theoretical framework

Since the pioneering works by  Bourdieu (1986) and Coleman (1988), several  researchers have made significant  contributions to enrich the theory of social capital from different perspectives (Putnam, 1995; Portes, 1998; Burt, 1995; Lin, 1999). Despite their differences,  there are least three points  in common in their conceptions of social capital:  (1) social capital is embedded in social networking;  (2) social capital is a product of  mobilized resources; (3) social capital facilitates certain purposive actions. With respect to education, all of them agree that social capital is of great importance to  the formation of human capital.    

Social capital is  a multiple-facet concept. Portes (1998) defines social capital as sources of social control, family-mediated benefits, and resources mediated by nonfamily networks.   Coleman (1988) stresses the importance of norms and social control. Smith and colleagues (1995)  elaborate  Coleman’s notion of socical capital and identify two dimensions of social capital: structural  social capital and  process social captial.   Furthermore,  the effects of one’s human capital and economic capital are expected to be amplified by social capital, as the effect of social multiplier (Glaeser, Sacerdote, & Scheinkman, 2002). From ecological perspective(Bronfenbrenner, 1989),  both family-based   and school-based social capital are multidimensional concepts  where both families and schools are inter-connected social institutions and influence  children on two levels: micro-level (individuals) and  meso-level (aggregate) (Haghighat, 2005).

Since late 1980s, a wide array of studies has been done to test the effects of social capital upon students’ school outcomes. Dika and Singh (2002) did an extensive review on the methodology and findings of these studies. The indicators of social capital in these studies include family structure (i.e., intact or non-traditional), parent-child discussion, parents’ involvement, parents’ expectation, etc. Most of them confirmed the positive relationship between the amount of family-based social capital and school outcomes.

We use PISA 2009 data to test the well-studied dimensions of social  capital guided by the following research questions.

Research questions

1)      Does family- and school-based social capital affect student reading achievement?

2)      Do the effects of different aspects of social capital vary from country to country?

[1] the Program for International Student Assessment

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