medium · MCAT psych-soc
A sociologist compares two neighborhoods with identical median incomes. Neighborhood X has dense overlapping ties—residents know one another, share childcare, and enforce informal norms—while Neighborhood Y has many residents whose strongest connections are to people OUTSIDE the area (employers, distant kin, weak professional acquaintances).
Job-finding rates are higher in Y, but collective efficacy (residents' shared willingness to intervene for the common good) is higher in X. Which pairing of mechanisms best explains this dissociation?
- Y benefits from bridging social capital and weak ties for information flow, while X has bonding social capital that supports collective efficacy
- This reverses the assignments: informational weak ties for jobs belong to Neighborhood Y, and bonding capital for efficacy belongs to X
- The two neighborhoods differ in network structure, not closure alone, so one mechanism cannot explain both outcomes, meaning the dissociation is genuine
- This swaps the concepts entirely: job information flows through bridging weak ties, while collective efficacy rests on bonding closure, not the reverse pairing
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