Bringing the Best of Two Worlds Together for Social Capital Research in Education: Social Network Analysis and Symbolic Interactionism

This article proposes an analytical consideration for social capital research in education by exploring a pragmatic combination of social network analysis (SNA) and symbolic interactionism (SI) as a research method. The article first delineates the theoretical linkages of social capital theory with SNA and SI. The article then discusses how SNA and SI can be utilized for social capital research in education by illuminating analytically complementary characteristics between SNA and SI. Based on this, the article argues that such a combined approach could pave a route to explore social capital in an analytically enhanced way.