Social Connectedness with the City of Tulsa as a Driver of Life Satisfaction, Hope, and Flourishing

As a medium sized metro area located in the South Central United States, The City of Tulsa has recently devoted substantial municipal efforts toward the aim of enhancing the well-being of Tulsa residents. Well-being literature highlights the importance of life satisfaction, hope, and psychological flourishing but has said little about the origins of these variables or their causal relationship to one another. The current study tested a path model, using social connectedness (SC) to Tulsa as an antecedent to life satisfaction, leading to greater flourishing and hope. In collaboration with area universities, Tulsa Human Rights Commission conducted a survey to measure these variables with 206 residents of the Tulsa community. Covariance based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) with maximum likelihood estimations was conducted, determining that the hypothesized model was the model of best fit. A subsequent bootstrapping analysis (N = 5000) further supported the theorized model. Results suggest that life satisfaction, flourishing, and hope have social origins, and that a sense of SC to a metro area, in this case Tulsa, plays an important role in driving variance in those respective variables. Should future research continue to support the theories presented in the current study, such results hold the potential to inform the approach municipal policy makers take to improve the well-being of metro residents, namely, promoting policy initiatives that promote SC to their respective cities as a tool to promote residents’ well-being. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.