Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility

Abstract Social capital—the strength of an individual’s social network and community—has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health 1–8 . However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers 9 , we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: SES-2018554, 2018554, SES-1629446, 1629446
• BA
  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• RW
  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• HU
  Harvard University
• SF
  Santa Fe Institute
• OF
  Overdeck Family Foundation
• CZ
  Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
• M
  Meta