Abstract

To measure people’s happiness, life satisfaction has been adopted as an alternative concept of happiness because people usually feel happy when they are satisfied with life. Social capital is known to highly impact a citizen’s life as a major social environment component. Although many researchers have studied factors influencing life satisfaction, few studies have focused on social capital as one of such factors. Thus, the objective of this study is to determine whether social capital could influence life satisfaction in OECD countries. Using multiple regression analysis, social network support as the measurement of social capital was significantly associated with life satisfaction. To explain how critically social capital is involved in life satisfaction, this study took the case of South Korea with diverse social data such as social conflict, government integrity, elderly poverty, and birth rate. Consequently, this study contributes to extending human’s relation to people’s perception of overall relationships, academically named social capital in connection with life satisfaction.