A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths

Abstract

In this article, Ricardo Stanton-Salzar offers a network-analytic framework for understanding the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Unlike many previous writers who have examined the role of "significant others," he examines the role that relationships between youth and institutional agents, such as teachers and counselors, play in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar provides the conceptual foundations of a framework built around the concepts of social capital and institutional support. He concentrates on illuminating those institutional and ideological forces that he believes make access to social capital and institutional support within schools and other institutional settings so problematic for working-class minority children and adolescents. Stanton-Salazar also provides some clues as to how some working-class minority youth are able to manage their difficult participation in multiple worlds, how they develop cultural strategies for overcoming various obstacles, and how they manage to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.