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Social Capital, Negative Event, Life Satisfaction and Sustainable Community: Evidence from 37 Countries

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Abstract

This study investigates the effect of social capital and negative events in 37 countries across six continents on subjective well-being, to improve the quality of life in creating sustainable cities and communities. Using large-scale, original, individual-level, cross-sectional survey data, we examine the relationships among negative events in social networks, social capital, and individuals’ subjective well-being. The negative impacts of these events on life satisfaction were found in both high-income and non-high-income countries. Moreover, people’s well-being was highly associated with well-organized social networks across all 37 countries, whereas the magnitude of the effects varied, this might be because the benefits realized from social network are variated across countries. Policies aimed at improving life satisfaction should not only focus on increasing the household income but also consider the substantial impact of social capital.

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Notes

  1. The regression models for the face-to-face survey sample from Mongolia and Sri Lanka have poor fit; the results are displayed in the Appendix Table A1.

  2. The classification standards of high-income countries (HIC) and non-high-income countries (non-HIC) are based on the criterions of world bank. Based on the gross national income (GNI) per capita in 2017, the world bank list of economies (2018) classified world economies into high-income—if the income is $12,056 or higher—and non-high income—if the income is less than $12,056—economies.

  3. It is known that when the regression model has multicollinearity problem, the parameters of explanatory variables might be estimated to have a strong bias. One way to address the multicollinearity problem is to add the regressors one by one to confirm whether the regression models exhibit multicollinearity. Therefore, the robustness check is proceeded by adding social capital and negative events one by one, and consistent results are derived, which indicates the regression model does not have multicollinearity. Because of the limited space, in the manuscript, we provide the following results by request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF20201001) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Institute & Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishi-ku, Fukuoka, 819-0395, Japan

    Xiangdan Piao & Shunsuke Managi

  2. Faculty of Economics, Hosei University, Machita-shi Aiharamachi, Tokyo, 194-0298, Japan

    Xinxin Ma

  3. Faculty of Policy Studies, Nanzan University, 18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, 466-8673, Japan

    Tetsuya Tsurumi

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  1. Xiangdan Piao
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Correspondence to Xiangdan Piao.

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Piao, X., Ma, X., Tsurumi, T. et al. Social Capital, Negative Event, Life Satisfaction and Sustainable Community: Evidence from 37 Countries. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 1311–1330 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-09955-1

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