The role of social capital in secondary school teachers’ work socialization process

Research on teachers’ professional development has emphasized the importance of professional interactions for teachers’ development (Baker-Doyle & Yoon,2020). Despite the increased attention to the social nature of teachers’ professional development, research focusing on teachers’ social position within the school network as a resource for this process is scarce. In the current study, we delved into this relatively unexplored area of research by building on theconcept of social capital (Lin, 2008). In particular, (1) we pursued a thorough investigation of the role of social capital in secondary school teachers’ professional development, and (2) in the process worked on an innovative method for combining traditional linear statistical models with social network analysis. The latter is related to the challenge of violating the assumption of independence of observations when exploring relational phenomena, preventing researchers from using traditional linear models to explore social network data (Tranmer et al., 2014). Recent developments inspired by the multiple membership model offer a promising avenue for progress in this area (Coppe et al., 2022). The current study built on this progress even further by bringing more advanced statistical routines (i.e., SEM) into the equation. In attaining the two aforementioned objectives, a sample of three whole school social networks was used. Preliminary analyses showed that social capital strongly predicts teachers’ development but with differential effects related to different measures of social positioning. Specifically, degree centrality showed the highest prediction coefficient, followed by closeness centrality. We did not find any significant relationship between betweenness centrality and teachers’ development