ArticlePDF Available

DESIGNING AND VALIDATING A SOCIAL CAPITAL SCALE WITHIN A GRADE SPECIFIC CONTEXT

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

This study designed a 40-item social capital scale (SCS) and explored its reliability and factorial validity by administering it to one thousand three hundred and fifty two grade three high school students in Mashhad, Iran. The internal consistency analysis and application of the Principal Axis Factoring to the data and rotating the extracted factors via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization showed that the SCS is a highly reliable scale which consists of ten factors, i.e. Availability. Further analysis of factors revealed that they were reliable and correlated significantly with the SCS and each other. The implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
... It also aims to explore the relationship between social capitals and English language achievement of students who study English in three branches of Khorasan Language Institute (KLI) in Mashhad. It is hypothesized that the forty indicators constituting the social capitals measured by the SCS will load on the same factors extracted by Khodadady and Alaee (2012a). It is also postulated that there will be no significant relationship between social capitals and English language achievement. ...
... The Persian Demographic Scale (DS) developed by Khodadady and Alaee (2012a) was employed in this study. It consisted of a number of open ended questions and multiple choice items dealing with variables such as participants' age, gender, family income and mother language. ...
... Social Capital Scale (SCS) developed by Khodadady and Alaee (2012a) [henceforth K&A] was employed in this study. It consists of 40 Persian social capital indicators collected from various sources as well as those reviewed by Dika and Singh (2002). ...
Article
Full-text available
This study aimed to 1) explore the social capitals of students who had registered in the three branches of Khorasan Language Institute (KLI) to learn English, 2) establish their factorial validity and 3) explore their relationship with English language achievement. To this end the 40-item Social Capital Scale (SCS) developed by Khodadady and Alaee (2012) and validated with grade three senior high school students in Mashhad was modified and administered to 493 female English language learners (ELLs) in the KLI. The application of Principal Axis Factoring and Varimax with Kaiser Normalization to the collected data showed that the SCS consisted of seven factors, i.e., Social Attachment, Parental Supervision, Parental Expectation, Helpful Others, Social Contact, Religious Activities, and Parent Availability. When the SCS was correlated with the ELLs’ scores on oral and written examinations, no significant relationship could be found between social capitals and English language achievement. Out of seven factors, only Helpful Others correlated significantly but negatively with ELLs' English achievement. The results are discussed from both empirical and theoretical perspectives and suggestions are made for future research.
... arents' educational encouragements (e.g., Furnstenberg & Hughes, 1995), parents' expectations (e.g., Carbonaro, 1998; Muller, & Ellison, 2001), parents' help with the homework (e.g., Wright, Cullen, & Miller, 2001), and parents' keeping track of their children's progress (e.g., Lopez, 1996) as the most significant social capitals in the literature. Khodadady and Alaee (2012) converted the above specified indicators of social capitals into a 40-item Social Capital Scale (SCS) and administered it to one thousand three hundred and fifty two grade three high school students in Mashhad, Iran. By utilizing the Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) method and rotating the latent variables via Varimax with Kaiser Normaliz ...
Article
Full-text available
An achievement test based on schema theory (S-Test) was developed on the passages comprising the English textbook taught at grade three in state high schools in Iran and administered concurrently with a validated and reliable Social Capital Scale (SCS) to four hundred seventy seven male and female participants. The Z-scores obtained on the S-Test were utilized to divide the participants into high, middle and low achievers. Among the ten factors underlying the SCS, i.e. significantly with their S-Test whereas a significant correlation was found between Parental Monitoring and S-Test for middle achievers, indicating that social capitals of these two ability groups function differently. The results also showed while middle achievers' scores on the semantic subtest of S-Test related significantly and positively to Parental Monitoring, Teacher Consultation and Family Religiosity, they correlated significantly but negatively with Parental Expectation and Helpful Others on the syntactic subtest. The semantic subtest also revealed the highest significant and negative relationship with low achievers' Teacher Consultation. The findings are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
Article
Full-text available
This study explored the relationship between parent education as an indicator of social capital and achievement in English as a foreign language (ELT). To this end, a demographic and a schema-based close multiple choice item test (S-Test) developed on a course textbook were administered to one thousand three hundred and fifty two grade three state high school students in three educational districts in Mashhad, Iran. The performance of students on the S-Test showed that it is a highly reliable measure of ELT achievement which enjoys high internal validity and discriminates significantly among high, middle and low achievers. When the S-Test scores of students whose parents had primary, secondary and higher education were compared with each other, it was found that the students with parents having secondary and higher education scored significantly higher than those with primary education. However, no significant difference could be found between the S-Test scores of the students whose parents had secondary and higher education. The results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
Article
Full-text available
This study employed a Persian Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) and a disclosed Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to explore the relationship between cultural intelligence (CQ) and English as a foreign language (EFL) proficiency. The administration of these two measures to one hundred forty five undergraduate university students majoring in various fields of knowledge in three Iranian universities showed that both the CQS and its Cognitive, Motivational, Behavioral, and Metacognitive factors are significantly but negatively related to the TOEFL and its structure subtest. However, when the EFL learners were divided into low, middle and high proficiency groups on the basis of their TOEFL scores, the scores of the middle proficiency group on the TOEFL and its structure subtest showed negatively significant correlations with the CQS and its Cognitive and Motivational factors indicating that only this group rate their own cultural intelligence higher in order to improve their low and developing EFL proficiency in general and its structure in particular. However, no significant relationships could be found between the reading subtest of the TOEFL and the CQS of low, middle (intermediate) and high proficiency groups. Neither did the four factors underlying the CQS correlate significantly with the reading subtest of the three groups. The implications are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
Article
Full-text available
This article applies Coleman's concept of social capital to understand differences in development among youth at risk of lifelong disadvantage. Utilizing data from a longitudinal study of 252 children of teenage mothers, we explore the relationships between measures of social capital and several indicators of young adult success. After considering bivariate relationships between the youth outcomes and the measures of social capital, we introduce controls for family human capital and the youth's status 3 years earlier. Our results suggest that social capital, broadly construed, plays a role in helping youth negotiate their way out of disadvantage. However, social capital appears to subsume a number of discrete dimensions that are differently linked to particular outcomes. A promising approach for future research is to examine how different types of social capital might be related to various arenas of success in early adulthood.
Article
Full-text available
This study explored the relationship between social and cultural capital and school achievement by developing, administering and validating a 35-statement questionnaire to 403 undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Teaching English as a foreign language and Persian Language and Literature and correlating their extracted factors with the grade point average of their high school diploma. The application of the Principle Axis Factoring to the participants’ responses and rotating the extracted factors revealed ten latent variables, i.e., literacy, parental consultation, family-school interaction, family support, extracurricular activities, family relationship, parent-school encouragement and facility, cultural activities, peer interaction and religious activities. Between the two logically developed subscales comprising the social and cultural capital questionnaire (SCCQ) only the social capital showed significant relationship with the GPA (.19, p <.001). Similarly, among the ten factors, parent-school encouragement and facility (.33), parental consultation (.22), family relationship (.20), and family support (.18), correlated significantly, i.e., p <.001, with the GPA. The implications of the results are discussed within a foreign/first language context and suggestions are made for future research.
Article
Seventy-three Latino middle school students participated in a longitudinal study of the preschool antecedents of their mathematics achievement. Path analysis indicated that family resources (parents' educational level, occupation, and income) predicted home literacy activities, which predicted combined early Spanish literacy and English language proficiencies at kindergarten entry, which predicted elementary mathematics achievement, which in turn predicted middle school mathematics performance. These results and qualitative analyses with a subsample of 30 randomly selected families suggest that literacy and numeracy proficiency go hand in hand, and to close the Latino mathematics achievement gap a combined effort of preschool and early elementary literacy and numeracy interventions programs are needed to supplement efforts in middle and high school.
Article
Coleman's theory of social capital predicts that students who have high levels of "intergenerational closure"-that is, whose parents know more of their children's friends' parents-will have better educational outcomes than will students with low levels of intergenerational closure. This study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to test whether intergenerational closure affects children's educational outcomes. The main findings were that closure was positively associated with mathematics achievement, but not significantly associated with achievement in any other subject, closure was not significantly associated with 12th-grade grade point averages, and students with more closure were less likely to drop out of high school by the 12th grade.
Article
It is widely acknowledged that single parenthood carries educational disadvantages for the individual children of single parents. Using NELS data, the author also found a detrimental contextual effect on 10th-grade mathermatics and reading achievement associated with attending a school in which a high concentration of children are from single-parent homes. This effect was evident even when individual demographic characteristics and family background were controlled. To account for this contextual effect, the author investigated the mediating role of a school's net socioeconomic status (SES) and net social capital, as indicated by parents' social relations and networks with other parents. She found that both can account for differences in mathematics and reading achievement between schools enrolling less than 25 percent and schools with 25-49 percent of students from single-parent families. Furthermore, there is evidence that even the academic disadvantage of attending schools with 50 percent or more students from single-parent families can be offset when social relations and networks among parents are strong.
Article
Using the concepts of cultural and social capital, I provide a theoretical framework for why there should be differential effects of parental involvement across cognitive (e.g., science achievement) and behavioral (e.g., truancy and dropping out) outcomes. Findings indicate that parental involvement is generally a salient factor in explaining behavioral but not cognitive outcomes, with greatest support for parent-child discussion and involvement in parent-teacher organizations. Findings also indicate that specific dimensions of involvement have greater effects for more affluent and white students, providing empirical evidence to support Lareau's (1989) contention that the greater levels of cultural capital possessed by members of the upper class magnify parental involvement's effect for advantaged students. The theoretical framework and associated findings provide insight into the seemingly inconsistent findings revealed in much previous research on parent involvement and achievement.
Article
Research on parental involvement suggests that families play a key role in students' school success. Using social capital theory as a conceptual framework, this study sought to identify unique characteristics of social capital held by successful African American students compared to those of successful White and nonsuccessful Black peers. It examined social capital along four dimensions: (a) parent-teen interactions, (b) parent-school interactions, (c) parent-parent interactions, and (d) family norms. Despite their comparatively more disadvantaged home environments, successful African American students demonstrated higher levels of social capital on 6 of the 11 indicators examined. The implications of these findings for parents, educators, and educational policymakers are discussed.
Article
This article argues that both parents' and children's educational expectations are spurred by between-family social capital and within-family social capital and that agreement between parents and children on educational expectations facilitates children's achievement. The analyses of eighth graders from four immigrant groups (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Mexican) and three native groups (Mexican, black, and white) indicate that high levels of parent-child interactions increase parents' and children's expectations and that higher shared family expectations enhance achievement and greater differences suppress achievement. Immigrant status increases expectations, for Chinese and Korean families more than for Mexican families, and Chinese background is beneficial for children's achievement, but Mexican background is harmful. However, all else being equal, the higher rate of retention of parental language promotes academic achievement, which gives immigrant Mexican children an advantage over their Asian counterparts.
Article
The critical role of significant others in status attainment continues to be interpreted mainly in functionalist terms. This article presents an alternative interpretation based on social reproduction theories and on current research on social ties and adult occupational mobility. Using the concept of social capital, defined as social relationships from which an individual is potentially able to derive various types of institutional resources and support, the authors examine data on the information networks of a selected sample of Mexican-origin high school students. Apart from the influence of parental socioeconomic status, they assess how students' grades and educational and occupational expectations are related to the formation of instrumental ties to institutional agents (such as teachers and guidance counselors). Although the authors found some evidence for the relation between grades and status expectations and measures of social capital, their strongest associations were with language measures, suggesting that bilinguals may have special advantages in acquiring the institutional support necessary for school success and social mobility.