For four decades, social capital research has rested on two broad measurement traditions. The name, position, and resource generators directly capture the social ties or resources individuals access or mobilize, while generalized trust and sociability items serve as proxies for the normative and relational dimensions of social capital. Both traditions have enabled cumulative, cross-national knowledge. Yet each instrument shows documented liabilities. Name generators impose heavy respondent and interviewer burden, since each named alter must be characterized and every alter pair assessed for mutual ties, a load that grows combinatorially with network size. Positional measures presuppose a rank-ordering of occupational prestige that may not hold equivalently across societies; resource generators depend on item inventories that may not capture locally salient resources; and generalized-trust items leave the referent of “most people” indeterminate, blending particularized and generalized trust and undermining cross-national comparability. Sociability counts, in turn, collapse active and nominal ties into a single measure.
This session invites work that advances measurement on multiple fronts: refinement, redesign, and validation of existing generators; development of context-sensitive or cross-culturally transferable instruments; integration of digital trace data, administrative records, or intensive longitudinal designs; and critical appraisals of measurement equivalence across national and institutional settings.
The session speaks to “Global Sociology in Turbulent Times” by asking whether instruments validated on stable, settled populations can measure social capital where it is most consequential: in mobile, displaced, and rapidly changing settings that depart from the conditions these instruments presuppose.
