Social capital found in one’s networks is an important driver of social mobility, or movement into higher economic strata with broader well-being.
Take, for example, students from low-income backgrounds. Having friendships and acquaintances across class lines can open doors to new information, support, and aspirations that could be out of reach within more homogenous networks. And more advantaged students can also benefit from connections with peers from different socioeconomic backgrounds, which can broaden their perspectives, reduce biases, and foster greater emotional intelligence.
But social networks are notoriously hard to measure, requiring researchers to field highly burdensome, time-consuming, and costly surveys.
As schools place more emphasis on helping students develop social capital, researchers will need to identify easier ways to measure how well schools are doing this and the school factors that can shape social networks.
In this study, the research team developed a measure of social networks using administrative data from five schools in the Detroit, Michigan, area, combined with student surveys and interviews. The team found that existing administrative data can help approximate students’ social networks and social capital, including cross-class ties. They also found that high school students are more likely to form friendships across social classes when they participate in the same extracurricular activities and elective courses.
Key Takeaways
The team’s findings suggest that where students lived mattered far less than their experiences at school. Most friendships were formed through shared experiences during the school day. Living near other students was less associated with peer friendships than shared classes and extracurriculars, especially at schools of choice, where students do not live in an attendance zone.
On average, high school students were over twice as likely to form a friendship when they participated in the same extracurricular activities. In interviews, students described the routine of sports practices and the team-oriented nature of extracurriculars as key for building connections with peers.
Shared elective courses were also associated with friendships. The odds of friendship were 28 percent higher for each additional elective course two students shared.
Shared core coursework was a third clear predictor of friendship. The odds of friendship was 50 percent higher for students who shared one past core course and increased incrementally with each additional shared course.
These school-related experiences (extracurriculars, electives, and core classes) generally operated similarly for cross-class and same-class friendships.
Exposure to a peer across multiple classes is associated with an increase in interaction and trust building. In interviews, students cited class activities that encouraged interaction—such as working on the same group project—as factors that contributed to friendship.
Analyzing administrative data can reveal patterns of social capital. Existing school district data on shared courses and teacher assignments, as well as data on extracurricular participation, can be used to measure social networks and cross-class ties. Although these data cannot fully replace social-network surveys, they may provide schools with a less burdensome way to assess students’ opportunities to form friendships and develop social capital. These measure-development findings will be shared in a forthcoming paper.
Potential Implications for Policymakers and Practitioners
Additional validation and translational work are needed to bolster these findings and enable their uptake into policy and practice settings, but SUMI sees the following potential applications:
Develop scheduling practices and program structures that increase cross-class interaction opportunities. District and school leaders invested in students’ cross-class social capital could examine whether course scheduling practices, extracurricular offerings, and course sequencing unintentionally prevent these students from forming relationships.
Bolster cross-class relationships by expanding and aligning extracurricular and career readiness opportunities. Work-based learning opportunities (e.g., career and technical education and apprenticeships), as well as out-of-school and extracurricular programming that help students become career ready through exposure and connection to the professional world and new experiences, could be early adopters of the insights generated by this study in terms of designing experiences that seem to cultivate cross-class ties.
Integrate social capital opportunity metrics into school information systems. School information system vendors could explore building key administrative inputs for measuring social capital like extracurricular participation into their platforms. More immediately, vendors could build views to help high school leaders see patterns in cross-class exposure using course and electives data.
Future Research Directions
Future research could explorethe following:
- what types of supports schools need to capture and analyze social capital using their administrative data
- which school and district conditions and programs help students develop cross-class ties
- how technology and social media use influence the strength and depth of cross-class ties
- how students mobilize these networks for long-term gain
- how school- and student-level social capital information could be useful for different audiences (e.g., students, parents, families making school choices, teachers, school and district leaders, and state officials
Methods, Data Sources, and Measures
In this measure-development study, the research team analyzed administrative and social network survey data from 11th-grade students in five socioeconomically diverse schools in the Detroit area, with varying levels of racial diversity, to examine social capital (as characterized by network density, reciprocity, homophily, strong ties versus weak ties, and cross-socioeconomic ties) as a potential driver of mobility. The researchers also conducted semi-structured interviews with six to eight students in four of these schools (28 total).
The researchers examined what measures from administrative data predicted students’ reported friendship networks, constructed from conventional roster-based social network survey data.
The researchers analyzed whether the following variables were associated with students having more friendships, and whether these varied for cross-class friendships:
- shared years in the same high schools
- number of shared core, elective, and honors classes
- distance between students’ homes
- extracurricular activities
- student demographics (i.e., gender, economic status approximated by free and reduced-price school meal eligibility, ethnicity, English language learner status, special education status, grade point average percentile, academic track or future education level aspirations, number of absences in the past school year)
In the coming months, the team will study the properties of the administrative data-based measure compared to established measures of social capital.
Research Team
Huriya Jabbar
Principal Investigator, University of Southern California
Sarah Winchell Lenhoff
Wayne State University
Tara Blagg
University of Southern California
Jeremy Singer
University of Michigan–Flint
Emerging Insights
Measuring skills that drive student upward mobility
Skills that drive student upward mobility
External resources
School Diversity and Social Capital: Conditions That Foster Bridging Ties in Schools (PDF)