Building Stronger Connections Among Students, Families, and Schools to Promote School Safety

Safe schools help promote positive social, academic, and educational outcomes. Research consistently suggests that students tend to be most successful in schools where they feel safe. For example, prior literature establishes that when students attend safe schools, they are more likely to graduate from high school compared to students who attend schools with behavioral problems or safety concerns. Over the last three decades, school shootings have garnered increased public attention, and the public has a heightened awareness that not all schools are safe environments for students. Drawing from ecological systems theory, this chapter will examine how the bonds between students and their schools are important for creating a school culture that is safe, inclusive, and supports the success of all students. Bridging social capital between families and schools also helps foster a safe school atmosphere, where students can focus on their academic and social development.

Digital Socialligators? Social Media-Induced Perceived Support During the Transition to the COVID-19 Lockdown

The sudden COVID-19-induced transition from a physical university life to a virtual one was a painful one for many students. Social distancing measures mean more than a simple change from face-to-face to online education. This study investigates how different social aspects, such as the students’ psychological sense of community, social capital, and use of social media, facilitated the perceived social support during the transition to the COVID-19 lockdown. Our results not only underline social media’s role, but also indicate that the perceived social support, as well as the bonding and bridging social capital, were particularly relevant during the transition process. Our findings are aimed at organizational management by recommending actionable ways in which they could improve social support by organizing computer-supported social networks, social support predictors, and specialized interventions for students with less perceived social support. As such, the study provides unique insights into the COVID-19-induced lockdown situation among students, while offering a transition model that also generalizes to other settings.

Advance rent mobilisation strategies of graduate renters in Ghana: a submarket of the private rental housing market

The practice of advance rent, where landlords ask renters to pay a lump-sum rent covering 2 or more years, is gaining scholarly and political attention in Africa. Nevertheless, there is limited empirical research investigating how renters mobilize funds to meet this financial commitment. Existing literature suggests that renters, irrespective of their educational level, face difficulties in paying advance rent, hence compelling them to rely mainly on their bonding (family and friends) and bridging (employers and financial institutions) social capital to pay advance rent. Drawing on rational choice and social capital theories coupled with data from a novel (graduate) sub-market of Ghana’s rental housing market, this article finds that personal savings remain the most rational current and future source of funding options graduate renters draw upon to pay advance rent, albeit some still drawing on their social capital. The findings demonstrate that graduate renters do not use bonding social capital in their future mobilization strategies after they have drawn on the same in previous years, although they continue to rely on their bridging social capital and other strategies to mobilize funds for advance rent. The study suggests the need to rethink rational choice and social capital theories to incorporate inter-temporal dynamics among different social groups and to traverse the current binary conception of the rental housing market in Ghana to consider different sub-markets and how they respond to existing challenges in the housing sector.

In Good Company? Personal Relationships, Network Embeddedness, and Social Inclusion

How do individuals’ networks of personal relationships affect their social in‐ and exclusion? Researchers have shown that micro‐level, informal relationships can be highly consequential for social inclusion, but in complex, contradictory ways: Personal networks reflect the degree of relational exclusion and protect against (other forms of) exclusion, but they also erode in conditions of exclusion and reproduce exclusion. While network researchers have widely studied some of these mechanisms, they have yet to embrace others. Therefore, this thematic issue reconsiders the complex relationship between personal networks and social inclusion. It offers a unique vantage point by bringing together researchers who work with different marginalised social groups, typically studied separately: refugees, transnational migrants, indigenous people, older people, people experiencing poverty, LGBT people, and women who have experienced domestic violence. This combination allows us to detect commonalities and differences in network functioning across historically excluded groups. This editorial lays the theoretical groundwork for the thematic issue and discusses the key contributions of the seventeen articles that compose the issue. We call for more attention to relationship expectations, the reciprocity of support flows, and contextual embeddedness, and question universally adopted theoretical binaries such as that of bonding and bridging social capital.

Social Networking Sites and Civic Participation: Analyzing the Mediating Role of Online Bridging Social Capital

Technological advancements have introduced creative communication media with social media being one of its kind. Since its introduction, the use of social media is rising in India providing people a better penetrating medium to share their views and ideas. These networking sites have given people a wide range of options to share views about social issues as well. Civic participation is a personal or group effort to resolve a social issue. With the onset of social media, offline civic participatory activities have made a transition to the online space as well. With the soaring influence of social media, this study aims to determine the extent to which Social Networking Sites (SNS) usage influences social capital and civic participatory behaviour. It aims to examine whether SNS use aids in the development of behavior that fosters civic participation. Further, the mediating role of online bridging social capital is analyzed in the relationship between SNS use intensity and civic participation of users. The results show the role of SNS in positively influencing online and offline civic participatory behaviour of the users with online bridging social capital acting as a mediating variable. However, the cross-sectional nature of this study constrained the ability to infer causal associations. The study concludes with recommendations and directions for future research. The different SNS can be compared to learn about their respective influence on civic participatory behavior and infer this phenomenon in an enhanced manner.

Post more! The mediating role of social capital between Instagram use and satisfaction with life

Since more and more people have begun to use social networking sites (SNSs), research on the use of SNSs is flourishing. This study examines Instagram use and the psychological well-being of the users. It was conducted based on two samples (n1 = 143 and n2 = 320) examining the relationship between Instagram use, social capital, and satisfaction with life using online questionnaires. Social capital was divided into bonding and bridging social capital and Instagram use was distinguished depending on an active and passive mode, respectively. Instagram use was measured by a behavioral report – the Instagram Activity Questionnaire (IAQ) – which was developed in accordance with the Facebook-Activity Questionnaire (FAQ; cf., Ozimek & Bierhoff, 2016). The results indicated consistently in both samples the occurrence of positive associations between mode of Instagram use and social capital variables. Furthermore, only bonding social capital – not bridging social capital – was positively correlated to satisfaction with life. A path model showed that the negative association of active Instagram use and satisfaction with life was positively mediated by bonding social capital. These results are discussed based on social capital theory. Limitations of this investigation are pointed out and suggestions for future research are outlined.

The effect of social capital on organizational repertoires of American Protestant missions

A religious organization’s choice of activities is shaped not only by theological goals but also the capital available to it. Prior research has shown how economic and religious capital influence Protestant missionary organizations’ repertoires of activism but has largely ignored the role of social capital. Using the most recent data on transnational American Protestant mission agencies, this study aims to fill this gap. Using a Bourdieuian field approach and multiple correspondence analysis, the study finds that linking and bonding social capital both shape whether an agency generalizes rather than specializes in specific ministry activities. Both bonding and bridging social capital, in turn, prompt a more other-worldly than this-worldly ministry orientation, but this is a pattern most characteristic of Evangelical agencies, suggesting an intersection between religious identity and organizational network size. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for interorganizational collaboration and resource use.

Gender gap in the impact of social capital on household food security in Zimbabwe: does spatial proximity matter?

Despite the numerous strides that have been made towards ensuring food security since the launch of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the gap between the rich and poor across and within countries is still worryingly too large. Around 57.7% of the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) population is food insecure compared to 26.4% of the world population. It is therefore necessary to make concerted efforts to improve food security in Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the developing world particularly among the poorest and most vulnerable groups. This paper employs propensity score matching analysis to explore gender heterogeneity in the impact of bonding and bridging social capital on household food security on the basis of a nationally representative sample of Zimbabwean households. It offers five major findings. First, female headed households are more likely to have bonding social capital than their male counterparts. Second, there are no gender differences in the household’s ability to possess bridging social capital. Third, household spatial proximity to households with social capital improves the probability of the household possessing social capital. Fourth, both bonding and bridging social capital improves household food security. Finally, female headed households are more able to increase food security than those headed by males when they have both bonding and bridging social capital. The study argues that coping strategies should target putting the family at the core of inclusive development agendas such as food and nutrition assistance programmes in order to maximise the likelihood of easing food insecurity within communities.