The logistic model treats school mobility and school changes as shifts in social capital.

Evidence

The analysis is carried out by use of a weighted logistic model with a random sample of 4,000 students from the public schools in the sample. The variables included in the model as measures of the family’s financial, human, and social capital were socioeconomic status (a single variable constructed of parents’ education, parents’ income, father’s occupational status, and household possessions), race, Hispanic ethnicity, number of siblings, number of changes in school due to family residential moves since fifth grade, whether mother worked before the child was in school, mother’s expectation of child’s educational attainment, frequency of discussions with parents about personal matters, and presence of both parents in the household. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 159

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to this reader’s interest in closure - the number-of-school-changes variable is Coleman’s proxy for disrupted community networks, a structural measure of lost closure rather than a psychological one.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is ‘frequency of discussions with parents about personal matters’ a meaningful proxy for closure, or just parental involvement? Coleman seems to bundle several distinct mechanisms under one social-capital umbrella.

Related

• Frequent family moves break the social networks that constitute social capital. (similarity 0.82)
• Across all variables, family mobility most strongly predicts school dropouts. (similarity 0.80)