Open AccessOn and Off the ’Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era
Author(s) -
Williams Dmitri
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00029.x
Subject(s) - yardstick , social capital , the internet , prima facie , bridging (networking) , set (abstract data type) , psychology , sociology , data science , social psychology , computer science , social science , political science , world wide web , mathematics , geometry , computer network , law , programming language
Scholars investigating the relationship between the Internet and social capital have been stymied by a series of obstacles, some due to theoretical frameworks handed down unchanged from television research, and some due to the lack of an appropriate yardstick. For example, the social interactions that occur through television are prima facie different from those that occur online. Given this basic functional difference, we cannot approach social capital research in an online era with the same set of assumptions and measures. To address this gap in the literature and in our measurement toolkits, this article reports on the development and validation of the Internet Social Capital Scales, or ISCS. These scales are intended to measure two different types of social capital—known as “bridging” and “bonding”—for both online and offline contexts. Question items are developed and tested and found to be valid and psychometrically sound. Potential uses of the scales are then discussed.