Abstract:

Social capital is referred as one of the factors that influence the place of an individual, a community, or a nation in a given social universe. Hence, the measurement of social capital is significant to understand the differentiation among these places of individuals. In this study, to comprehend the social capital in Turkey, we aimed to measure the social capital of individuals via constructing a composite index. After scrutinizing the data and the indicators used in the former studies in the literature and comparing them with the official and nationally representative data for Turkey, we saw that 2014-2015 Turkey Time-Use Survey presents the most suitable data and it provides information about the structural aspect of social capital. We conducted a factor analysis and found three factors to construct a social capital index, namely everyday sociability, social network support, and cultural sociability. Our findings revealed that the social capital level for women is lower than men, derived from the very high level of everyday sociability of men, while social network support and cultural sociability of women are higher than men.

Keywords: