ABSTRACT
During the last fifteen years, the idea of social capital has been elaborated in the social sciences as a promising new look at sociological phenomena and a theory that shows how and why relational networks are important for explaining various individual outcome measures. Various unresolved issues and ambiguities still remain, however. One of these is the measurement of social capital (Flap 1999, Lin 1999a, 2001). Although many studies have focused on the distributions and specific consequences of social capital, similar theoretical elements have been operationalized into many different measurement methods. Standardization in measuring social capital appears to be still far away (Flap 1999, Snijders 1999, Lin 1999a, 2001). There has been an abundance of ad hoc measures, often derived from data that were not specifically designed for the measurement of social capital but that happened to be available for analyses. This has made thorough and specific testing of social capital theory difficult because of lack of possibilities for structural comparisons.
