Abstract
Through social relationships, social capital is accumulated. Growing evidence supports the presence of social capital influencing academic outcomes through structural opportunities. Unfortunately, little evidence can be found to explain how differences in social capital application toward academic outcomes can occur with seemingly similar individual with the same structural opportunities. This area of interest is particularly important for populations with limited or less visible opportunities. This study examined the social networks of Somali-American students to determine the factors that may lead to differential utilization of resources within similar social networks. A mixed-methods approach was employed in this study. Based on the findings, the authors argue for a broadening of the social capital in education discourse to include agency within structural opportunities.
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Notes
- 1.
It is fair to say that there is a dark side to social capital. For example, Sampson et al. (1999) argue, “social capital can be drawn upon for negative as well as positive goals” (p. 636). Those interests can be democratic or perverse.
- 2.
The terms “Black” and “African American” are used interchangeably in this study. However, we used the term “US-born African American students” or “US-born black students” in order to distinguish nonimmigrant African-American students from recent African immigrant students.
- 3.
Notably, a few parts of the verbatim transcripts were edited for clarifying the contexts of interviews.
- 4.
Because of a lack of standardized achievement information such as state-mandated test scores, grouping students by G.P.A. needed to be done carefully. Therefore, labeling of the achievement groups is based on information from the school principal. According to his data and experience with the school over the last few years, students whose G.P.A. is higher than 3.2 have a higher chance of going to 4-year universities, including major state universities. Conversely, students whose G.P.A. is lower than 2.3 have quite a low chance of attending college. As a result of this grouping, we identified 34 low or mid achievers and 13 high achievers. For a simple comparison, we combined the low and mid achievers into one group.
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Lee, M., Madyun, N. (2012). Deciphering Somali Immigrant Adolescents’ Navigation and Interpretation of Resources Embedded in Social Relationships. In: Bekerman, Z., Geisen, T. (eds) International Handbook of Migration, Minorities and Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1466-3_42
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