Individual-Level Social Capital in Weighted and Attributed Social Networks

There is no agreed definition of social capital in the literature. However, one interpretation is that it refers to those resources embedded in an individual's social network offering benefits to that individual in relation to achieving goals and facilitating actions. This can be viewed as a resource-based interpretation of social capital aimed at the level of individuals. In this paper, we propose a family of social capital measures in line with this interpretation. Our measures are designed for a model of social networks based on weighted and attributed graphs, and cover four dimensions of social capital: (i) access to resources, (ii) access to superiors, (iii) homogeneity of ties, and (iv) heterogeneity of ties. We demonstrate the real-world application of our measures by exploring an illustrative use case in the form of a workplace social network.