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Analyzing the Relationship Between Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Social Affiliation

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Abstract

While previous studies have established social capital as an important determinant of subjective well-being (SWB), the broader social context people are living in has not received much attention in terms of SWB. To address this issue, we propose the concept of social affiliation, measuring the feeling of belonging to the social whole, of being a respected and valued member of society. In contrast to standard concepts of social capital, social affiliation is not related to an individual’s direct environment (‘Gemeinschaft’), but concerns one’s relation to society (‘Gesellschaft’). Such a subjective evaluation of how an individual feels within a broader societal context is neither covered by traditional concepts of social capital nor by the concept of social cohesion which focuses on the macro level. A perception of oneself as living on the margins of society, of not being a respected member of society, is very likely to diminish subjective well-being. At the same time, it can be expected to not be completely unrelated to individual resources of social capital. Drawing on unique survey data from Japan, we analyze the triangle relationship between social capital, social affiliation and subjective well-being applying a structural equation model. Our results have two main implications. First, we show that social affiliation has an effect on subjective well-being that is independent from the effect of standard measures of social capital. Second, we find that social capital influences social affiliation, and thereby also has an indirect effect on subjective well-being. In terms of theory building our results suggest that social embeddedness has two elements which should be measured separately: a community dimension usually measured as social capital in terms of trust, personal networks and norms, and a societal dimension of being and feeling part of a ‘Gesellschaft’, measured as social affiliation.

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Notes

  1. For a broader overview of related concepts to social capital see Lochner (1999).

  2. Note that, as a subjective measure, such an evaluation does not have to coincide with the actual state of social integration of that particular individual.

  3. An estimation of the model with incomplete data would exhibit less bias than excluding cases with missing values from the analysis (Byrne 2010: 359). However, an estimation of the model with missing values only yielded marginally different results than with the delimited data set. Therefore, the authors decided to proceed with the data set from which missing data had been deleted.

  4. The lowest income group earns less than 1,120,000 Yen. This corresponds to less than 50% of the official median income in 2009, which is the threshold set by the Japanese government to define relative poverty. Respondents who fall into this category are highly likely to face socioeconomic difficulties. Middle incomes are divided into two groups with incomes ranging from 1,120,000 to 2,240,000 Yen (50–100% of median income) categorized as lower middle, and incomes ranging from 2,240,000 to 3,360,000 Yen (100–150% of median income) grouped as upper middle of the income range. The highest income group earns over 3,360,000 Yen, which equals more than 150% of the median income.

  5. To ensure equivalency in meaning, the items were first translated from German into Japanese by a native Japanese speaker. The Japanese version of the scale was then pre-tested with 10 native Japanese respondents from different age groups and educational levels. Next, problems discovered in the pre-test were discussed at a workshop with eight Japanese experts in survey research and two German researchers who are fluent in Japanese. The Japanese version which resulted from this was then back-translated into German by a native German speaker who did not know the original scale. This back-translation showed that the intended meaning was preserved.

  6. The significant Chi square seemingly indicates that the fit of model to the data is not adequate. However, as Chi-square is sensitive to sample size, a non-significant Chi-square is difficult to achieve and has proven unrealistic in most empirical research (Byrne 2010: 76–77, Bagozzi and Yi 2012: 28). To address these limitations of the Chi-square, a number of alternative, more practical fit indices have been developed, which are commonly used as adjuncts to the Chi-square statistic. The authors here use the four indices discussed above.

  7. Detailed results on the CFA model are available from the authors upon request.

  8. Goodness of fit indices for the full structural equation model with controls before respecification: Χ2 (112) = 728.447, p = .00, RMSEA = .064 (90% CI = .060 to .068), CFI = .934, TLI = .910, SRMR = .041.) Estimating the model without control variables leads to qualitatively similar results which are available upon request.

  9. In the structural equation model, the six items measuring social affiliation (SA1-6) were coded in reverse with 1 = ‘totally applies’ and 7 = ‘does not apply at all’. High values, therefore, indicate strong feelings of social affiliation.

  10. This is especially the case for the group of the non-employed, which includes involuntarily unemployed (n = 184), who have been reported as having comparatively low levels of subjective well-being (Hommerich and Kobayashi 2015), as well as students (n = 5), homemakers (n = 135) and retirees (n = 58). The latter two groups usually display comparatively high levels of subjective well-being (ibid. as well as Tokuda et al. 2010).

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Acknowledgements

The survey used in this analysis was generously sponsored by the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ). We are grateful for the support. Any errors or opinions are ours alone.

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Correspondence to Carola Hommerich.

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The authors declare that the submitted work complies with the accepted principles of ethical and professional conduct in scientific research and that there are no conflicts of interest. The respondents participated voluntarily in the survey. Beforehand, they received information about the purpose of the study as well as about the institution commissioning the survey.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Table 3 Summary of the sample distribution of the demographic and socioeconomic indicators
Table 4 Descriptive statistics for social capital
Table 5 Descriptive statistics for social affiliation
Table 6 Descriptive statistics for subjective well-being
Table 7 Correlations between the control variables included in the SEM

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Hommerich, C., Tiefenbach, T. Analyzing the Relationship Between Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Social Affiliation. J Happiness Stud 19, 1091–1114 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9859-9

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