The neighborhood context affects social capital, yet scholars do not adequately account for the dynamic nature of the social spaces people occupy in measuring social capital. Research has focused on neighborhood effects as though the neighborhood space is fixed across all inhabitants without regard for the ways individuals define their neighborhoods considering their own spatial location and social interactions. Using a neighborhood‐level social capital measure, we examine the relationship between cognitive neighborhood boundaries and social capital in residents (N = 135) of two public housing communities in a Southern urban city. As collective efficacy (bonding social capital) increased so too did the predicted size of one's cognitive neighborhood. GIS maps demonstrated that participant boundaries included areas of commerce and services necessary to build and maintain social capital. Larger cognitive neighborhoods suggest one may interact with a wider array of people to achieve instrumental and expressive returns despite the high‐poverty neighborhood context.

Previous research has often treated the ideology of Black Nationalism as a singular, uniform set of beliefs. We explore the attitudinal complexity of African‐American support for Black Nationalism and discover two distinct dimensions of Black Nationalism, which we label community nationalism and separatist nationalism. While the former dimension enjoys support among several black subgroups, including more affluent blacks, the latter dimension is distinctly supported by blacks who are either younger, male, or less affluent. Furthermore, community and separatist nationalists generally agree upon a core set of nationalist tenets, although they diverge on the definition and breadth of the black struggle.

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There have been several recent attempts to operationalize and measure empirically attitudinal support for Black nationalism. However, scholars have not yet reached a consensus as to what precisely constitutes Black nationalism and its manifestations. Our work addresses three critical questions. First, is Black nationalism a uni-dimensional or a multi-dimensional construct? Second, is Black nationalism another form of xenophobia? Third, is support for Black nationalism a function of time? Some scholars note that Black nationalism takes on the character of its material context and that it cannot be easily subsumed into a trans-historical ideology (Reed 2002; Robinson 2001). We indirectly test these hypotheses by examining the relationship between two components of Black nationalism-Black separatism and Pan-Africanism. To test these hypotheses, we analyze data from the 1979-1980 National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA). Overall, we establish the determinants of support for Black separatism and Pan-Africanism while distinguishing these ideologies' similarities and differences.

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