Resource-Generator Social Capital, Life Satisfaction, and Depression Among Young Adults in Seoul, South Korea

Individual social capital denotes the embedded resources in personal social networks. Resource generators are one of the three representative methods to measure individual social capital along with name and position generators (Van Der Gaag and Snijders 2005). Resource generators probe if one has any social ties that can provide necessary assistance for various needs such as job-search or legal information, provision of helping hands for household chores when sick, lending money, listening ear, or caring about one’s well-being. Whether and how resource-generator social capital is associated with life satisfaction and depression in young adults is not well documented in the literature. The present study used a two-wave longitudinal data set from the Seoul Young Adults Panel Study (SYPS) surveys administered in 2021 and 2022 on the respondents aged between 18 and 35 at the first wave. The retention rate between the two waves was 72.4%, and the final sample size was 3,762. The study used the fixed-effects regression model to conservatively estimate within-person changes over time. The multivariable regression results found that resource-generator social capital was positively associated with general life satisfaction. Further, resource-generator social capital was significantly related to thirteen domain-specific life satisfaction such as quality of life, health, achievement, safety, prospects for the future, work, or communal environment. On the contrary, resource-generator social capital was negatively associated with the number of depressive symptoms reported by young adults in Seoul. In conclusion, the presence of social ties that may provide expressive and instrumental resources increases general and specific life satisfaction and decreases depressive symptoms in young adults.