Capitale sociale e istituzioni educative residenziali. Il caso degli educandati in Italia

The research has as its subject Italian state boarding schools. The work was carried out within the context of the Italian school educational system across a range of objectives and hypotheses of research. Beyond a theoretical analysis of the concept of social capital, the first part of the work revolves around a series of explorative macro objectives, which allow one to observe the way in which social capital intervenes in the educative processes within secondary ( middle) schools. Social capital has been studied in its diverse forms, in particular at three levels: micro, intermediate and macro. Micro social capital refers to relationships between students and the family, intermediate social capital is understood as relationships between equals and with relevant scholastic institutions, and finally the macro level is investigated with reference to generalized interpersonal trust and faith in social institutions. The whole analysis looks in depth at aspects of trust and cooperation. Particular attention has been paid to the evaluations of relationships developed within such educational institutions, boarding schools open to students for the whole scholastic year. Within these cognitive and formative processes we investigated what represents the future for new generations within the wider panorama of social capital, understood as a resource for society in its entirety. Starting from these hypotheses, the second part of the investigation tries to verify these sociological dimensions using both quantitative and qualitative methodological forms. The specific educational institutions offer very significant contexts of communal life. Starting from the historical reality of the Napoleonic period, which originated these institutions, we wish to bring to light the important values at the birth and origins of these institutions. This has been made possible through the semiological analysis of the Royal Decree ( not the 1812 text, but the revised one from 1925), and of the founding rules, through the analysis of their texts, using the Atlas software. The same methodology of semiological analysis has been applied to texts coming from a series of focus groups and from in-depth interviews with present female boarding students and ex boarders from the first half of the last century. In this way it was possible to compare generational differences, the different types of vision, the social values, trust in institutions, orientation to trust and cooperation present in boarding schools. One wished to discover the form of social capital and its development. Within these manifestations of social capital, its diverse characteristics emerge: bridging ( directed towards external relationships) and bonding (concentrated on internal relationships), investigated through quantitative analysis. The quantitative phase of the research has been conducted administering a questionnaire to a representative sample of the students of all the boarding schools in Italy. In particular the questionnaire was handed out to female and male students and boarders from the second to the fifth year of Liceo (Middle School). Data was compared with a control sample of students from a state school. The complex system of collecting data has been elaborated with the use of the SpSs software system. The comparison of the data collected with the data extracted both from the questionnaire and from the textual analysis provide results that are significant and sociologically relevant.