The Role of Cultural Participation on Subjective Well-Being in Mexico

This paper aims to examine whether the relationships between cultural participation and subjective well-being, informed by social capital theory, are significant in the Mexican population. With data from the 2012 Self-reported Well-Being Survey (BIARE in Spanish), a dataset that evaluate how people experience their quality of life, we performed several ordered logit regression analyses. Results reveals that reading books, reading articles, participating in art classes, and attending movies and theater (cultural participation categories) are associated, at different odds and probabilities, with life satisfaction, positive emotions, and affective balance, but not with negative emotions (subjective well-being components). Besides, social support networks, social integration, and trust (social capital dimensions) present positive statistically significant effects on life satisfaction, positive emotions, and affective balance; and negative significant effects on negative emotion. These outcomes emphasize, first, that the relationship between cultural participation and subjective well-being in Mexico should be studied in their separate categories and components. Second, the social capital approach potentially provides critical insights in the understanding of the phenomenon.