Parental Social Capital, Neighborhood Characteristics, and Educational Achievement of Elementary School Students

Family and neighborhoods are important social settings that influence children�s development. Children interact with the environments nested around them. Drawing on social capital approach and Bronfenbrenner�s ecological framework, the study examined the relationships between parental social capital in education, characteristics of local and extralocal neighborhoods, and educational achievement of elementary school students using data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011). The study built a series of multilevel models that took into account both the space aspect and the place aspect of neighborhoods to examine how families, local neighborhoods, and extralocal neighborhoods, independently or jointly, influenced elementary school student academic achievement. There were two main research questions: (1) What are the relationships between characteristics of local and extralocal neighborhoods and aspects of parental social capital? (2) What are the relationships between parental social capital and students� academic achievement? Are the relationships between parental social capital and students� academic achievement adjusted by inter-neighborhood variation? Results showed that different domains of parental social capital were affected by different aspects of neighborhood characteristics, and school-based parental social capital was important for first grade students� academic achievement. Additionally, the study disentangled the effect of extralocal neighborhoods from the effect of local neighborhoods on parental social capital and academic achievement whereby local- and extralocal- neighborhood both independently and jointly influence parental social capital and students' academic achievement. Neighborhood conditions other than neighborhood SES contributed to parental social capital and academic achievement. Findings pointed to the need for research focused on the contextual contributions to children�s development.