Friendship network composition and subjective wellbeing

Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and Russell Smyth

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Using data from the UK Community Life Survey, we present the first study to examine the relationship between heterogeneity in one’s friendship network and subjective wellbeing. We measure network heterogeneity by the extent to which one’s friends are similar to oneself with regard to ethnicity and religion. We find that people who have friendship networks with characteristics dissimilar to themselves have lower levels of subjective wellbeing. Specifically, our two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimates, using measures of ethnic and religious diversity based on the Herfindahl-type fractionalization index that are flipped between adjoining rural/urban areas as instruments, suggest that a standard deviation increase in the proportion of one’s friends from different ethnic (religious) groups is associated with a decrease of 0.276 (0.451) standard deviations in subjective wellbeing.

Keywords: friendship; heterogeneity; social capital; networks; wellbeing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J15 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/158003/1/N ... 0and%20wellbeing.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Friendship network composition and subjective well-being (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:158003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().