Social Capital in Multiple Spheres: Measuring Social Capital at Home and at School.

A relatively neglected problem is the analysis of how individuals derive social capital from more than one context, and the extent to which they may benefit from the capital derived from each context. In this paper we address this deficit through a study of child reading achievement. We hypothesize that children derive social capital from both their families and from their schools, and we believe that capital from each context is influential in promoting reading achievement and use two national data sets (NELS and NLSY79) to test these hypotheses. We first demonstrate that it is feasible to derive sound models of capital in these two respective contexts, the home and the school. We then demonstrate that capital from each context is helpful to promoting child reading achievement. Our empirical strategies allow us to evaluate the extent to which specific measures of capital actually reflect more than one context simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]