The current study examines the role of cultural capital and techno-capital in the academic social capital formation process, focusing on adult online college students (N = 725) enrolled at a private not-for-profit university in the US. Multiple regression results indicated that cultural capital predicted behavioral integration, an important means through which academic social capital is cultivated; yet, techno-competency, a subscale of techno-capital, predicted the ways in which students perceived their own integration. The findings lend support to the notion that students with higher levels of cultural capital enact academic engagement because they have a better understanding of the “rules of the game,” but techno-capital enables individuals to mobilize a particular set of skills and their socialized understanding of the online context to extract value and realize the benefits from academic engagement.

本研究考察了文化资本和技术资本在学术社会资本形成过程中的作用，重点关注成人在线大学生（N = 725）就读于美国的一所私立非营利性大学。多元回归结果表明，文化资本预测行为整合，是培养学术社会资本的重要手段；然而，技术能力，技术资本的一个子量表，预测了学生感知自己融入的方式。研究结果支持了这样一种观点，即具有较高文化资本水平的学生制定学术参与是因为他们对“游戏规则”有更好的理解，但技术资本使个人能够调动一组特定的技能和他们的社会化理解在线环境以提取价值并实现学术参与的好处。