Social trust and well-being inequality according to social stratification

Abstract

Subjective well-being (SWB) has attracted a considerable amount of attention in a wide variety of research areas, and previous research has demonstrated the existence of well-being inequality according to social stratification, such as class and status. However, whether class and status have distinctive effects on SWB, even when each is controlled, and whether class and status inequalities in SWB vary depending on social trust remain ambiguous. To fill these gaps, this study focuses on both class and status—two dimensions of social stratification—to examine whether social trust affects class and status disparities in SWB. This analysis employs repeated cross-sectional international comparative data from nine waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2002 to 2019 and a two-way fixed-effects model to examine the moderation effects of social trust on the impacts of the two dimensions of social stratification on SWB. Via an international comparative analysis, this study reveals that class and status have significant positive effects on SWB even after each factor is controlled and that social trust has significant moderation effects on the association between social stratification and SWB. These results indicate that the two aspects of social stratification, i.e., class and status, have differing impacts on SWB and that social trust reduces well-being inequality according to social stratification.