Shrinking, but happy? The impact of social capital on subjective well-being in rural Japan

 About the workshop

 About the workshop

Demographic decline and structural change in rural areas are challenges that industrialized countries such as Japan are increasingly faced with. While the negative impact of this development can be traced by objective social indicators, the subjective well-being in these rural communities does not show a clear direction: Notwithstanding structural problems the majority of findings point towards increased well-being in rural areas compared to urban social environments.

This interdisciplinary project of Japanese Studies, Community Sociology, Network Sociology, Political Science and Psychology links well-documented positive effects of social capital with its prevalence in rural communities and aims at directly assessing positive effects of social capital and related indicators on rural well-being.

We address methodological issues still affecting happiness research such as sampling techniques that allow only rough differentiation of social environments, singular well-being indices, levels of analysis and assessment methods without consideration for external influencing factors, interindividual differences and regional conditions or happiness conceptions: With reference to the Subjective Well-being (e.g. Diener et al. 1984) and Interdependent Happiness (Hitokoto/Uchida 2015) concepts of happiness, the mixed-methods approach of this study allows for integrating a qualitative (pre-)study (interviews, focus groups and participant observation) with a subsequent quantitative follow-up (questionnaire with full census and intraregional comparison) as well as qualitative case examples. Furthermore, by including predictors on a social (participation, sense of community and networks) and individual level (personality, internal migration) as well as their interaction we aim to fill in the gaps and contribute toward a new understanding of the complex role of social ties and social capital on rural well-being. 

This project is embedded within the research group “Aso 2.0: Regional Well-Being in Japan” and “Happiness in Japan” at the University of Vienna Department of East Asian Studies as well as Kumamoto University. On site in Japan and in Vienna the research team receives professional input through a broad network of mentors and experts in the field and participates in disseminating findings in the form of workshops and conferences to the wider scientific community.