Meta-Analysis of Studies on the Relationship Between Social Capital and Happiness

The importance of social capital in creating happiness has led to various researches and studies around the world, including Iran, from which often contradictory results are obtained. Given such circumstances, re-research in this field, on the one hand, increases the inflation of research and data, and on the other hand, strengthens the perception of social research as vague, unproductive and even impractical research. It is necessary to re-examine and analyze all the researches in the form of meta-analysis. In this way, we first reached 49 studies by considering the criteria that were in accordance with the input criteria, and after a more detailed study and considering the exit criteria, 31 studies were selected for this research by meta-analysis method. The results of this study in the field of the relationship between social capital and happiness showed a significant relationship between these two variables and the extent of this relationship according to Cohen’s interpretive system is moderately high. The results also showed that social capital has a different effect on happiness by adjusting the four variables of “dimensions of social capital”, “unit of analysis”, “field of study of researchers” and “geographical area of research”.