Relationships between Contextual Variables, Social Capital and Satisfaction from Quality of Life: A Case Study in Rural Areas of Fars Province of Iran

In this paper social capital is a concept with two dimensions: structural and cognitive. The structural dimension of social capital is measured by using four indicators: group membership, reciprocity, differences in characteristics between people and exclusion from social services while the cognitive dimension is measured by using trust, solidarity/cohesion and conflict. The impacts of social capital and contextual factors such as demographic, socio-economic and personal variables are evaluated against satisfaction from quality of life. In order to analyze the data and examine the hypothesis we use two statistical technique, i.e Pearson Correlation coefficient and multivariate regression analysis. Data was collected from 12 villages by using sampling method and interviewing 509 head of households. From 20 hypotheses 12 were confirmed that five of them were related to social capital. The overall regression model was significant which confirmed the main argument of the study. It means high level of social capital would lead to high level of satisfaction from the quality of life. Therefore, social capital is a better predictor of the satisfaction from the quality of life than contextual factors.