This article draws from an ongoing debate over explanations of homicide. Within this debate, we investigate the pro-social effects of civil society and social capital. Few cross-national studies explore whether elements of social capital either increase or decrease homicide. The cross-national work that does is often characterized by small,…

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between social capital and subjective well-being (life satisfaction) by using multilevel analysis considering both individual and area-level social capital while adjusting for various control variables at multiple-levels in Seoul, South Korea. The data was from the 2010 (Wave 2) Seoul Welfare…

Social capital has been studied by academics for more than 20 years and within the past decade there has been an explosion of growth in research linking social capital to health. This paper investigates social capital in Hamilton, Ontario by way of a telephone survey of 1,002 households in three neighbourhood groups representing high, mixed and…

Resilience is desirable for promotion as a resource for international students to sustain adjustment and withstand stress. A yet uncertain way for the promotion is the student's connectedness with host or local people. To ascertain the benefit of local connectedness, this study surveyed 215 sojourn students originating from Mainland China who…

The concept of social capital has become very popular but its definition and measurement are still rather unclear. We frame our study in one of its components, social participation. In this article we develop an optimal measure for social participation based on the questions asked in the first round of the European Social Survey. Our analyses…

The goals of this study were to validate a number of available collective social capital measures at the US state and county levels, and to examine the relative extent to which these social capital measures are associated with population health outcomes. Measures of social capital at the US state level included aggregate indices based on the…

This paper presents a new index to quantify, measure and monitor the progress towards the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. This index is based on a set of relevant, accepted, credible, easy to monitor and robust indicators presented by the European Commission at the time the strategy was launched. The internal analysis of the index shows…

Research on subjective well-being (SWB) for western nations has been growing for the last 30 years. So far there has not been any study of Subjective Well-Being in the case of Greece. This study is the first attempt to quantify the SWB in Greece which is in a state of deep economic and values crisis. For this purpose the Personal Well-being Index…

This paper examines the influence of college education on social trust at the individual level. Based on the literature of trust and social trust, we hypothesize that life experience/development since adulthood and perceptions of cultural/social structures are two primary channels in the causal linkage between college education and social trust.…

The main purpose of this research was to construct a multi-dimensional (composite) index measuring the overall level of rural development and quality of life in individual rural regions of a given EU country. In the Rural Development Index (RDI) the rural development domains are represented by hundreds of partial socio-economic, environmental,…

In this paper, we examined dimensions of child health-related quality of life in Greece in relation to parental assessments of neighbourhood social capital and social support networks. For the analysis, two main measures were used: (1) child self-reported health-related quality of life in ten dimensions, as measured by the KIDSCREEN questionnaire;…

Using data from surveys on "social quality survey questionnaires", carried out by the Asian Consortium for Social Quality between 2009 and 2011, this study investigates the causes of social exclusion in six Asian societies. About 6,460 questionnaires were completed and the analysis of the data reveals the features and the causes of…

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…

In this paper we examine whether individualization and informalization processes have occurred in the field of leisure in The Netherlands, by analyzing the social context of a wide range of activities between 1975 and 2005. We find that the choice of a particular leisure context is dependent on education, gender, year of birth, age and time…

In this article, we investigate the effect of individual and community level characteristics on subjective well-being in Belgium. Various indicators for subjective well-being are being used in a multilevel analysis of the 2009 SCIF survey (n = 2,080) and the 2006 Belgian ESS sample (n = 1,798). On the individual level, most hypotheses on the…