Li Yaojun, Ding Lin
Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Manchester University, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Front Sociol. 2024 Jan 18;9:1215676. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1215676. eCollection 2024.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to the socio-economic lives of people all over the world. Research has also demonstrated great inequality in the pandemic experience. In the UK as in many other countries, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and in working-class positions have suffered disproportionately more than the majority group and those in salariat positions in terms of income loss, financial difficulty, and vulnerability to infection. Yet little is known about how people coped in the daily lives and tried to maintain their well-being during the most difficult days of the pandemic through social capital.
In this paper, we draw data from the COVID-19 Survey in Five National Longitudinal Studies to address these questions. The survey covered the period from May 2020 to February 2021, the height of the pandemic in the UK. It contains numerous questions on contact, help and support among family, friends, community members, socio-political trust, and physical and mental health. We conceptualise three types of social capital and one type of overall well-being and we construct latent variables from categorical indicator variables. We analyse the ethnic and socio-economic determinants of the three types of social capital and their impacts on well-being.
Our analysis shows that social capital plays very important roles on well-being, and that ethnic minority groups, particularly those of Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Black heritages, faced multiple disadvantages: their poorer socio-economic positions prevented them from gaining similar levels of social capital to those of the white group. However, for people with the same levels of social capital, the effects on well-being are generally similar.
Socio-economic (class) inequality is the root cause for ethnic differences in social capital which in turn affects people's well-being.
新冠疫情给全世界人民的社会经济生活造成了难以估量的破坏。研究还表明，在疫情经历方面存在巨大的不平等。在英国，如同许多其他国家一样，来自少数族裔背景且处于工人阶级地位的人们，在收入损失、经济困难以及感染易感性方面，比多数群体和从事薪资工作的人遭受了更多的不利影响。然而，对于人们在疫情最艰难的日子里如何通过社会资本应对日常生活并努力维持自身幸福感，我们却知之甚少。
在本文中，我们从五项全国纵向研究中的新冠疫情调查中提取数据来回答这些问题。该调查涵盖了2020年5月至2021年2月这一时期，即英国疫情最严重的阶段。它包含了许多关于家庭、朋友、社区成员之间的联系、帮助与支持、社会政治信任以及身心健康的问题。我们将社会资本概念化为三种类型以及一种总体幸福感类型，并从分类指标变量构建潜在变量。我们分析了这三种类型社会资本的种族和社会经济决定因素及其对幸福感的影响。
我们的分析表明，社会资本对幸福感起着非常重要的作用，少数族裔群体，尤其是那些具有巴基斯坦/孟加拉和黑人血统的群体，面临着多重劣势：他们较差的社会经济地位使他们无法获得与白人群体相似水平的社会资本。然而，对于具有相同社会资本水平的人来说，对幸福感的影响通常是相似的。
社会经济（阶层）不平等是社会资本种族差异的根本原因，而这反过来又影响人们的幸福感。
