Editing Social capital (section)

=== Catholic schools (Coleman and Hoffer) ===
Coleman and Hoffer collected [[Quantitative research|quantitative data]] of 28,000 students in total 1,015 public, Catholic and other private high schools in America from the 7 years' period from 1980 to 1987.<ref name=":11">Coleman and Hoffer (1987) "High School and Beyond"</ref> It was found from this [[Longitudinal study|longitudinal research]] that social capital in students' families and communities attributed to the much lower dropout rates in [[Catholic school]]s compared with the higher rates in public.

Teachman et al. (1996) further develop the family structure indicator suggested by Coleman. They criticise Coleman, who used only the number of parents present in the family, neglected the unseen effect of more discrete dimensions such as stepparents' and different types of single-parent families. They take into account of a detailed counting of family structure, not only with two biological parents or stepparent families, but also with types of single-parent families with each other (mother-only, father-only, never-married, and other). They also contribute to the literature by measuring parent-child interaction by the indicators of how often parents and children discuss school-related activities.<ref>Teachman et al. (1996)</ref>

Morgan and Sorensen (1999) directly challenge Coleman for his lacking of an explicit mechanism to explain why Catholic schools students perform better than public school students on standardised tests of achievement.<ref>Chen (2002)</ref> Researching students in Catholic schools and public schools again, they propose two comparable models of social capital effect on mathematic learning.  One is on Catholic schools as norm-enforcing schools whereas another is on public schools as horizon-expanding schools. It is found that while social capital can bring about positive effect of maintaining an encompassing functional community in norm-enforcing schools, it also brings about the negative consequence of excessive monitoring. Creativity and exceptional achievement would be repressed as a result. Whereas in horizon expanding school, social closure is found to be negative for student's mathematic achievement. These schools explore a different type of social capital, such as information about opportunities in the extended social networks of parents and other adults.  The consequence is that more learning is fostered than norm-enforcing Catholic school students. In sum, Morgan and Sorensen study implies that social capital is contextualised, one kind of social capital may be positive in this setting but is not necessarily still positive in another setting.<ref name="Morgan 1999">Morgan and Sorensen (1999)</ref>