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his two sons. However, unlike the previous case, which also featured a
Friendship configuration, this Friendship configuration is fully connected,
with no centralisation. This, at first sight, seems to contradict the associa-
tion between Friendship configuration and bridging social capital that we
stressed above. However, we saw that Friendship configurations in Portugal
show a similar level of bonding social capital to the other configurations,
unlike the two other countries. As is often the case in Portugal, friends
included in personal configurations are regarded as family members and
are therefore actively connected not only with Ego, but also with Ego’s
partner or spouse and children. This is less true in Switzerland, as we saw
in case A, where despite the high integration of friends and other non-kin
in personal networks, they are less likely to be considered as family. These
two examples illustrate how the same configuration may present a differ-
ent structure depending on the national contexts and the pattern relation-
ships between the network members, in particular the level of embeddedness
of friends within the other set of close ties.
Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show how crucial countries and the composition
of configurations are for the social capital produced by personal networks.
We now need to better understand how such countries and the composi-
tion of configurations interact with other variables such as gender, educa-
tion, and cohort. Table 6.4 presents a set of regression models that take
into account all those influences on social capital together.
Education has a curvilinear effect on social capital: individuals with
high levels of educational attainment have more bridging social capital
than individuals with lower levels of formal education. The former are
more likely to have access to more diversified circles of interaction and
information, and they include more friends. Interestingly, gender also has
an effect on social capital, which confirms findings from studies on older
individuals (Girardin and Widmer 2015 ). On average, women have less
densely organised supportive ties, and they are more central in them than
men. Women, as care providers, have the ambivalent advantage of being
central in support networks without being central in interaction net-
works. This situation has consequences for them, such as often being
overburdened by family work and frequently experiencing frustrations
and tensions in connection with network members (especially family)
(Widmer 2016 ). Finally, it is striking that cohort membership has no
E.D. Widmer et al.