| Abstract: | Social capital is a central concept in social science research, and it is measured in diverse ways. Few measurement approaches take the network structure of complex institutional settings into account. In this study, using data from a large-scale school-based randomized field trial, we develop several factor analytic models to test the validity and reliability of a new survey battery capturing multiple dimensions of social capital in such settings. We demonstrate that it is important to account for institutional and network structure in social capital measures, and we show how social capital can be operationalized as the shared variance between different relational characteristics in complex settings with multiple subnetworks. |
