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Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research 3/2013

01.02.2013

Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?

verfasst von: Carlo Klein

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 3/2013

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Abstract

The theoretical analysis of the concepts of social capital and of social cohesion shows that social capital should be considered as a micro concept whereas social cohesion, being a broader concept than social capital, is a more appropriate concept for macro analysis. Therefore, we suggest that data on the individual level should only be used to analyze the relationship between social capital, social cohesion indicators and subjective well-being and that they do not allow commenting on the level of social cohesion in a society. For this last type of analyses aggregated indicators of social cohesion have to be computed which is not the issue of this paper. Our empirical analysis is based on individual data for Luxembourg in 2008. In general, our results suggest that investments in social capital generate monetary returns (increased income) and psychic returns (increased subjective well-being) even in a highly developed and multicultural country like Luxembourg. When we are adding on the micro level variables representing the economic domain of social cohesion following Bernard (1999), then we observe that this domain also has an effect on income and on subjective well-being. Therefore, we recommend including the economic domain in any future analysis using the concept of social cohesion.

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Fußnoten
1
Even if there were earlier works about social capital (see Putnam 2000), the recognition of the concept in the social sciences happened during the eighties.
 
2
These restrictions are due to the fact that a certain number of questions are only available for the Luxembourg EVS wave of 2008.
 
3
Acket et al. (2011) therefore consider Chan et al.’s (2006) definition that excludes the economic domain.
 
4
This method considers that the observed individual characteristics can be used to describe social cohesion of a community or a society.
 
5
The used variables will be described in more details in paragraph 4.
 
6
Even if the question about happiness states: “Taking all things together, would you say you are: very happy, quite happy, not very happy, not at all happy”.
 
7
For a detailed presentation of the EVS studies, see: http://​www.​europeanvaluesst​udy.​eu/​.
 
8
The definitions of the variables are presented in “Appendix”.
 
9
The used social capital/cohesion variables slightly differ from those used by Dickes et al. (2008, 2009) because we only consider the EVS wave 2008 and so we do not have Dickes et al.’s (2008, 2009) constraint to use only variables that are available for 1999 and 2008.
 
10
This last variable has been excluded from the happiness function to respect the identification condition mentioned on page 12.
 
11
To give an equal weight to the emotional and the cognitive aspect of SWB, we have computed the global indicator as follows: global = [(happy/4)*10]+ satisfaction.
 
12
Here we only present the variables measuring social capital and those variables allowing discussing social cohesion on an aggregated level. The complete results can be obtained from the author.
 
13
This can be illustrated by the fact that the same regression without the “dependency” variable gives no significant coefficient for the “child” variable so that we can expect social benefits to correct the potential loss of income due to child care.
 
14
See “Appendix”.
 
15
The complete results can be obtained from the author.
 
16
Only the coefficient of “Formal ch. economic domain 2” is statistically significant.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Social Capital or Social Cohesion: What Matters For Subjective Well-Being?
verfasst von
Carlo Klein
Publikationsdatum
01.02.2013
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 3/2013
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9963-x

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