A Quantitative Measure for Meal-Mate Social Capital Networks

摘要

This paper investigates meal-mate social network in terms of social capital. We propose a framework to quantitatively measure social capital and apply this framework to our dataset. Our measure is based on assumption that social capital is only related to the structure of the social capital network and we discuss the assumption on different scales of abstraction. We precisely define what we call "invested social capital"and"return of social capital" to characterize the bidirectional properties of a social capital network. It is found that invested social capital per edge is always greater than return of social capital per edge under certain conditions. The experimental results show that the females have larger social capital than the males in the network, where the number of men greatly exceeds the number of women. Also students with number of higher education study years possess more social capital in a general sense.