Kroll, Christian
(2011)
Towards a sociology of happiness: examining social capital
and subjective well-being across subgroups of society.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This dissertation contributes to a Sociology of Happiness by examining the social
context of subjective well-being. It follows in Emile Durkheim’s footsteps, whose study
Le Suicide initially proposed that being connected is beneficial for human beings. The
empirical evidence on the relationship between social capital and subjective well-being
has indeed grown considerably over the last years. However, the academic literature has
a major shortcoming, as studies usually assume the importance of social capital for
subjective well-being to be exactly the same between individuals. Interestingly, though,
sociological theory gives reasons to expect the association between the two concepts to
vary between societal subgroups based on the idea that people have different roles and
find themselves in different circumstances. Hence, this thesis responds to a need to
examine a new level of complexity and fills a research gap by investigating how social
capital is correlated in different ways with life satisfaction by gender, age, parental
status, and marital status. OLS and ordered logit regression analyses are conducted in
order to systematically examine slope heterogeneity, using data from the European
Social Survey for the UK. It turns out that the social context of well-being varies
considerably between the subgroups studied here. For example, while among childless
women volunteering is positively and very strongly associated with subjective wellbeing,
the relationship is slightly negative for mothers.
Consequently, this dissertation adds significant value to the happiness literature by
looking beyond population means when studying the relationship between certain
explanatory variables and a well-being response variable. Moreover, the thesis
contributes to a much-needed theory building in research on subjective well-being by
resorting to sociological theories. Important implications for current policy issues
around well-being arise from the study, and it paves the way for a new wave of research
which goes beyond a unitary ‘happiness formula’.
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