Geospatial inequality of social capital: comparing the effects of opportunity structures across regions and over time

Unequal regional development has brought about specific industries that give rise to diverse job markets and lead to imbalanced employment opportunities across geographical areas. While occupational structures shape the overall work status, income, and job potentials for local workers, they also constrain the prospects for building job-based connections through which residents accumulate their social capital. This chapter first reviews the effect of recent advances in sampling surveys and geospatial data on the emerging geospatial approach to social capital. It then evaluates varying strategies for comparing how position-generated social capital varies by the local occupational structures, based on multilevel survey data collected across states, metropolitan areas, and counties in the United States. In addition to integrating occupational data from both individual and local levels, an alternative approach uses repetitive cross-sectional survey data to decompose the factors that contribute to regional gaps in position-generated social capital change in Taiwan over time.