
Christofer Edling
Dean | Professor

The effects of specific occupations in position generator measures of social capital
Author
Summary, in English
The position generator is a widespread method for measuring latent social capital in which respondents are queried about contacts on a list of occupations predefined by the analyst. We separate out the unique contribution of each occupation to aggregated measures of social capital. It turns out that this contribution varies vastly: knowing a person in some occupations provides substance to measures of social capital, while knowing a person in a few occupations is irrelevant and contributes statistical noise and causes attenuation bias. We discuss the implication of our findings for the design of position generator measures generally.
Department/s
- Sociology
Publishing year
2015
Language
English
Pages
55-63
Publication/Series
Social Networks
Volume
40
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Elsevier
Topic
- Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Keywords
- social capital
- position generator
- measurement error
- Jack-knife
- sociologi
- sociology
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0378-8733