Social capital—the strength of an individual's social network and community–is often mentioned as a factor in helping people move out of poverty. A study by Opportunity Insights analyzed data on more than 1 billion friendship connections on Facebook to get a sense of how stratified by socio-economic status friendships in America are and to explore how cross-class friendships relate to upward mobility.
Researchers measured three types of social capital in U.S. communities: economic connectedness (degree of interaction between low- and high-income people); the cohesiveness of social networks; and civic engagement (rates of participation in community organizations). Among the key findings are that social networks are segregated by income. Higher-income people tend to have higher-income friends: For example, 34 percent of the friends of people in the top 10 percent income distribution also come from the top 10 percent. For people in the bottom 10 percent, only 2 percent of friends come from the top tier. Social disconnection by class, data analysis indicated, is due to both segregation by income and "friending bias" (well-off people are more likely than poor ones to befriend well-off people).
Using this Facebook interaction data to identify which large U.S. counties in the study are, on average, most economically connected revealed that people who grew up low-income in more economically connected counties tended to have higher earnings as adults—and that differences in economic connectedness largely explain why segregated areas have less upward mobility.
The findings highlight the importance of communities being socioeconomically integrated, which has implications for policy issues like zoning laws and school admissions. The study concludes that, "If children with low-income parents grew up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-income parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20 percent on average."
