Role of Social Capital in Determining Happiness and Life Satisfaction: Mediation of Self-reported Health Using Path Analysis

This study links social capital with people’s health and well-being using data from the seventh wave of the World Value Survey, logistic regression, and path analysis. The study’s findings show that happiness and life satisfaction are two different measures of the same construct, or well-being. The determinants of each are also characterised differently: while life satisfaction is more of a stable and relative measure and is more strongly influenced by civic cooperation, social participation, and educational attainment, happiness is more of an unstable measure and is more strongly influenced by community belonging, trust and confidence aggregates, including employment and location of residence of an individual. Moreover, freedom of choice, financial satisfaction or social comparison, and state of health were the most important factors influencing happiness and life satisfaction. The findings also show that self-reported health (SRH) has a greater impact on happiness than a measure of life satisfaction. Path analysis shows out of the three other components of social capital—community belonging, civic engagement, and social participation—trust and confidence aggregates are the ones that have the biggest impact on increased social capital. For both well-being measures, SRH mediated the relationship. The life satisfaction measure had a higher level of mediation of SRH than happiness, but social capital had a smaller direct impact on life satisfaction than on happiness. SRH was found to be partially mediating this relationship for both happiness and life satisfaction measures, which means that people with higher social capital reported feeling better off.