Social Capital and Adolescent Delinquency: The Bagcilar Sample

Social capital is a concept that is widely used in social sciences, both in empirical studies and in theoretical debates. Many academic studies have considered social capital as a solution to social problems and have presented various findings on the relationship between social capital and one of the leading social problems, adolescent delinquency. However, these studies have not examined the multidimentional effects of social capital on adolescent delinquency. In this study, in order to overcome this deficiency, using the Youth in Europe survey, which was conducted to students studying in the Bagcilar district of Istanbul, the effect of social capital on adolescent delinquency was investigated, while controlling for the basic variables at the individual level. The results indicate that social capital has both preventative and stimulating effects on adolescent delinquency. Thus, it was shown that social capital has not always been a solution to social problems, and it might sometimes be the cause of these problems