The Networks and Cultural Assets Project (NCA)
Measuring Students’ Community Cultural Wealth and Social Networks
The Networks and Cultural Assets Project (NCA) administers survey and interview instruments to measure students’ Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) and social networks, then provides results to local educators for academic and career development purposes.
Historically, research and programming involving undergraduates of color focused on what these students lack – an approach that not only demotivates students, but also misses opportunities to support them as they build upon their existing strengths. Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) is a framework focusing on students’ assets, including skills and dispositions from their families, communities of origin, cultures, and personal experiences. For example, familial capital refers to cultural knowledge nurtured within families or fictive kin, and resistant capital is knowledge created through challenging inequality and resisting subordination.
Our survey, recently tested with students at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Texas System, combines measures of different forms of CCW with personal network analysis adapted from previous work (Burt, 1984; Sablan, 2019). This instrument shows how students’ CCW is nurtured in their relationships both on and off campus and reveals connections between students’ CCW and measures of interest to career development professionals (e.g., work volition, work values). Our study team also conducted semi-structured interviews with a subset of survey participants to better understand those relationships and experiences that have the greatest impact on their CCW, career trajectories, aspirations, and resilience.
Read the research report on Community Cultural Wealth (PDF)!
Publications by the Networks & Cultural Assets Project
This study is in its pilot phase, so we welcome conversations with other researchers interested in CCW. Our team includes Ross Benbow, Nidia Bañuelos, and Kyoungjin Jang. Our research is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation (Award #2201545).
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 2201545. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.