The Follies of Measuring Social Capital
In the "Position-Generator..." authors Lin, Hsung, and Fu operationalize social capital and evaluate the measurement methodology of a position generator. Social capital is defined as the resources embedded, accessible, and mobilized in a social structure. The authors discuss the relative distribution of resources as a social capital asset in communities, and refer to Putnam's study of declining participation in voluntary organizations. While there is a brief allusion to immigrant resources on page 60, I would have liked for the authors to approach the topic of other social resource groups in greater depth, such as informal money pools found in some Asian immigrant communities or The United Negro College Fund, and what this may mean in the structure of immigrant or ethnic affiliation communities in the wake of a society bemoaned for "Bowling Alone." The authors cite Burt's work to comment that stategic locations such as structural holes indicate social capital itself, but explain further that mobilization, not just access, of these resources must be studied as well. The position generator methodology is explained, and measures of range, heterogeneity, and upper reachability of accessibility are all identified.
The authors use a previous study by Lin and Dumin to evaluate the position generator's results. The study found that friends and acquaintances provided the best access to high status positions and the range of accessed statuses, thus adding a dimension of diverse social mobility and contacts to Granovetter's unique information weak ties. This omission of relatives concurs with our findings in previous weeks, as relatives will be the most homophilious (genetically) to us, and thus less likely to be sources of unique and socially diverse contacts. The authors continue to remark that the "position-generator approach has yielded similar findings for different political economies," (64) including capitalism and socialism. Does this mean that the economic relationships produced from an economic system (specifically ones as divergent in the ideal types of socialism and capitalism) do not affect our social capital and access/mobilization of embedded resources?
The authors study the return of unequal access on individual well-being and find that in a Taiwan social networks study: males generate more returns from social capital (and nonkin contacts) than females, and females have to rely on human capital (education) more than males do. This differential gender returns on social capital made me think back to Elizabeth Bott's study on couples with separated gender roles and duties. Do you think these women in these connected networks have more or less access to social capital through their partners than the shared role females? Also are these results a reason why more women are attending college than males? Do you think that if they replicated this study with single fathers and single mothers access to social capital in obtaining resources to help with their family, the results would be the same? The work concludes by postulating that network location is a precursor to access to social resources, dishearteningly concordant with Gladwell's remark that poverty can be evaluated through social isolation or the distance between some citizens and Lois Weinberg.
In "Auditing Information Structures in Organizations," De Jong and Zwijze-Koning confront communication network flows in organizational dynamics and evaluate research methods for reliability, validity, and applicability. This reading was not as engaging as previous works, as it sort of bordered on lame Taylorism in improving workplace information transfer and also reiterated a methods review chapter in an introductory Sociological Research course. I did however find the section on diary research interesting, in light of assignment #3. The authors advise that it is not practical to "keep a communication activity diary for..more than five consecutive days." (436) They also illustrate the pitfalls of this technique, ranging from respondent underreporting of less than 30 second contacts, not including outgoing messages, underestimation of frequency of contacts, and propoensity to omit certain types of messages. For this last point, the authors refer to a study by Conrath, Higgins, and McClean, and I am curious as to if this was a social desireability effect or something deeper. The authors highlight the difficulties of diary research in terms of feasability, so I am looking forward to seeing the class results for our New Media log project.
"The Resource Generator," is another social networks study from The Netherlands that we are reading in class. This paper advocates a revised (easier and more concretely intepretable) social capital measurement method called the "Resource Generator" and delineates the nuances of social capital into four separately accessed portions: political/financial, education, personal skills, and personal support. This differentiation of social capital niches is great, and addresses many of the questions I had about specific immigrant milieus or social support for single fathers during my reading of the "Position Generator." The Resource Generator uses similar questionairre to the Position Generator, and measures availability of resources and tie strength to accessor. The authors cite six cognitive domains in their construction of generic social capital, including private productive activities, public relationships, and public productive activities. Referring to Wellman's characterization of the shift from networks from the public to the private sphere and Smith-Lovin et al's work in transformed discussion networks, would we find similar changes in responses and goal attainment in (2) personal relationships and (5) public relationships in recent years? The findings were very interesting, as the Resource Generator put more emphasis on familiar access to resources, but pointed the weak tie advantages of "knowing people working at the town hall" (important from our local governance problems with Gans) and "good references to jobs." (Granovetter revisited) The results show that almost all items are accessed by atleast 50% of respondents, a statistic that would be interesting to figure in American society admist obsessions on social stratification, isolation, and competition for access to resources.
In "Simplifying the Personal Network Generator," Hampton and Marin evaluate two alternative methods, the MMG and the MGRI, to unreliable single name generators and cumbersome multiple name generators. The authors expound upon the history of name generators in social network research, discussing the follies of a generic application of name generators to the four types of personal network approaches and the temporal "cost-cutting" of replacing a multiple name generator with a single name generator in determining the complexities of social support. The authors describe their methods in the E-Neighbors Project, complete with six name generators. I have a hard time empathizing with the problems of multiple name generators, because I actually enjoy filling out such surveys. However, I am sure many researchers value the attempts at finding a valid and reliable alternative method that does not contribute to respondent fatigue. It has also proven a little difficult to critically review a piece by someone who has shaped our course reality on social network analysis. Nevertheless, it was interesting to read about this week's readings on the new approaches to measurement problems, as many probably never invest in the challenging and daunting task of conceptualizing and measuring social interactions!