Social Capital and Psychological Well-Being of Chinese Immigrants in Japan.

Shun Gong,Senhu Wang,Peng Xu

doi:10.3390/ijerph18020547

Abstract

Social capital in immigrants has drawn considerable attention from social scientists. Previous studies have paid attention to how immigrants’ bonding social capital (defined as social networks with co-ethnic residents) and bridging social capital (defined as social networks with native residents) are associated with their economic achievement. However, little attention has been paid to immigrants’ different social capital’s effects on psychological well-being. Drawing data from Chinese immigrants in Japan, we examined how these Chinese immigrants assimilated into Japanese society and how their bonding and bridging social capital related to their psychological well-being. The results show that bonding social capital directly affected immigrants’ psychological well-being, whereas bridging social capital indirectly improved their psychological well-being by improving economic status. This study contributes to previous literature on how immigrants’ different social capital is related to their psychological well-being.

Highlights

The social capital theory is undoubtedly one of the most influential theories in social science
Chinese immigrants in Japan, we examined how these Chinese immigrants assimilated into Japanese society and how their bonding and bridging social capital related to their psychological well-being
Model 1 includes the independent variables for bonding social capital; Model 2 regresses immigrants’ psychological well-being on bridging social capital, and Model 3 is a full model including both bonding and bridging social capital

Summary

Introduction

The social capital theory is undoubtedly one of the most influential theories in social science. The conceptualization of social capital and its effects on society has attracted a considerable amount of interest from scholars [1,2,3]. Amid rising research discussions on social capital distinguish between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital [3,4]. The definition is based on the actors to whom the networks are connected. Bonding social capital refers to within-group connections while bridging social capital refers to betweengroup connections [5]. It is argued that bonding and bridging social capital have different effects on individuals’ psychological well-being and economic achievement [3,5,6]

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