This paper aims to clarify the association between various social capital components at the municipal level (community social capital) and two quality-of-life factors at the individual level [individual self-rated life satisfaction and self-rated health (SRH)] based on data from a nationwide social capital survey that the authors carried out in 2013 in Japan (N = 3406 in 99 municipalities). The survey covers residents in Japan between the ages of 20 and 79 years. We focus on both contextual social capital and household income inequality in terms of the Gini coefficient at the municipality level since, to the best of our knowledge, no paper has explicitly dealt with municipalities in Japan as the units of contextual social capital and the Gini. Our analyses show that the subjective life satisfaction of individuals, after controlling for socioeconomic status and health at the individual level, is associate with both an income gap and social capital at the municipal level. Every component of community social capital in this study except for generalized reciprocity, both cognitive (generalized trust, particularized trust, and particularized reciprocity), and structural (three types of group participation and daily contacts with neighbors, friends/acquaintances, and colleagues), and the Gini coefficient on earned income were associated with self-rated life satisfaction at the individual level with statistical significance. However, SRH is associated only with cognitive social capital at the community level. SRH has no significant association with structural components of community social capital or with a community income gap in terms of the Gini coefficient on personal income. Judging from the results of estimates in the study, most of the components of community social capital at the municipal level seem to play an important role in enhancing self-rated life satisfaction. Life satisfaction may be associated with the broad atmosphere of the municipal level where one resides, while SRH is associated with cognitive social capital rather than structural social capital. However, the difference in the impact of contextual social capital between the two QOL indices may indicate the importance of considering a proper contextual level that is suitable for the outcome.
The definition of social capital varies depending on the author (Lin, 2001, Coleman, 1990, Putnam, 2000, Portes, 1998 and Kawachi et al., 2004). Putnam, 1993 and Putnam, 2000 used a broad definition covering trustworthiness, norms of reciprocity, and networks, while many researchers conducting empirical studies in the field of social epidemiology have tended to use narrowly defined social capital focusing on either structural components such as networks (Verhaeghe et al., 2012) or cognitive elements such as trust and reciprocity (Ichida et al., 2009 and Suzuki et al., 2010). In this paper, we adopted a broad concept of social capital, defined as trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks with externalities through human minds (Inaba, 2005) because the broad definition is more suitable to express the contextual aspects of social capital that induce cohesion or collective behaviors among the members of the community. In other words, while narrowly defined social capital focusing on either cognitive social capital or structural social capital could be useful in explaining the behavior of individual actors, broadly defined, social capital could be of importance in explaining the formation of preferences or values among the members of the community, which leads to collective behaviors.
The contextual social capital can be measured at various levels, such as countries, states, metropolitan areas, counties, municipalities, school districts, census tracts, and neighborhoods. For instance, generalized trust, which is trust toward the general public, can be measured at the individual level as well as at the various contextual levels as, for instance, the average of individual generalized trust.
This paper focuses on contextual social capital at the municipality level in Japan since, to the best of our knowledge, no paper has explicitly dealt with municipalities in Japan as the unit of contextual social capital in spite of the fact that it is obviously one of the most important contextual levels. As shown in Table 1, preceding studies based on multilevel analyses have focused on either the broad side (prefectures – Hibino et al., 2012 and Oshio and Kobayashi, 2009) or the narrow side (areas in one particular municipality, such as kyusons, old administrative districts that existed until 1953 – Ichida et al., 2009 and Aida et al., 2009 – and the cyo–cyo, the smallest spatial unit – Fujisawa et al., 2009, Hamano et al., 2010, Murayama et al., 2012 and Murayama et al., 2014). As of May 2013, there were 1742 municipalities in 47 prefectures in Japan and as many as 217,351 cyo–cyos. With regard to kyusons, which literally means “old villages,” there were as many as 71,314 kyusons at the start of the regime in 1888, and the number had dropped to 9868 by 1953, when they were finally abolished as formal administrative areas (Mistry of Internal Affairs and Communication, 2015).
