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Objectives: social capital is a concept developed in sociology an also used in business, organizational behavior, political science and economics. In this article the process of social capital formation in a sample of university students is reported. Method: To develop an empirical model, we have assumed that individuals have two kinds of sources to form their social capitals: “identity sources” and “knowledge sources”. Moreover, we assumed that these sources are “necessary sources” not “sufficient sources”. The social capital would be produced, if these sources could be evolved to the social trust, the social norms and the social nets. Therefore, the research tries to answer this question: to what extent do these sources affect the social capital formation. The research method is survey. A sample of 199 students were randomly selected from a list of registered students for 2008 in the Faculty of Administrative Studies and Economics at the University of Isfahan (Iran). Findings: For estimation of the empirical model we used the OLS method to find how the “identity” and “knowledge” sources affect the internal values of individuals. For this, human capital was used as the main proxy of knowledge sources and the religious beliefs was used as the main proxy of identity sources Results: The estimation results show that, in the selected sample, the identity sources (religious beliefs) has had a positive and significant effect on the social capital formation, though, there is no such a relationship between the social capital formation and the knowledge sources (human capital). Furthermore, we found that males had a higher level of social capital than females.

Keywords: social capital, human capital, identity sources, knowledge sources, trust, social participation

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