Does Capital at Home Matter More Than Capital at School? The Case of Adolescent Alcohol and Marijuana Use

Abstract

Following Coleman’s analysis of social capital, the norms that discourage adolescent substance use should be more successfully transmitted to young people who enjoy greater stores of social capital. We hypothesize that youth derive social capital from their families and from their schools, and test whether higher levels of capital from each context are influential in resisting substance use and abuse. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that social capital in the family is helpful in protecting adolescents from using alcohol and marijuana, whereas social capital built at school has essentially no effect on the same outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on social capital as well as for policy interventions using schools as sites to discourage adolescent drug use.