Like Parent like Child? Intergenerational Social Capital Transmission and the Effect on Economic Self-Sufficiency in the UK.

A common adage related to finding employment is that it is not what you know, but who you know. Social capital, or the density of your network, is thus central to employability. In this paper we explore to what extent young people’s (18-35) social capital affects their economic self-sufficiency, more crucially investigate the extent to which these values, attitudes and actions are transmitted from their parents. We do this by drawing on data from our two generational cross-sectional survey in the UK of young people (N3000) and one of their parents (N500). Whilst there is a vast literature exploring how political socialisation happens in for example the school context (Neundorf et al, 2016), there is a paucity of research on the intergenerational transmission of social capital in the family context specifically and this paper seeks to address this gap. Furthermore, the paper aims to explore to what extent the existence or lack of parental social capital affects the young person’s economic self-sufficiency.