The research methods of social capital on the internet

Studying social capital development and functioning on the Internet is an urgent issue of modern social science. The current transformational processes caused by the evolving Internet technologies are contradictory. On the one hand, we can observe an emerging role of information in social processes, which means a decline in the number of links between all participants of information interactions, the increased intensity and multi-formats of interactions. On the other hand, such transformations lead to information inequality and the crisis of confidence among the participants. To resolve the existing contradiction, it is essential to study social capital from the perspective of science, which is necessary to optimize social management, forecasting and designing in an online environment. However, this is impossible without a clear understanding of the methodological base that takes into account the peculiarities of using social capital techniques on the Internet. The authors analyze the existing methods of studying social capital. These methods do not measure social capital on the Internet in full, therefore they should be supplemented by such specialized procedures of Internet researches as the semantic network analysis, hyperlinks network analysis, and netnographic approach.