Structure of Social Capital in Contemporary Japan : From view points of Social Stratification and Lifestyle.

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Social capital is thought of as the fourth capital which follows after economic capital, human capital, and cultural capital. The purpose of this research project is to bring out the generating processes of, and function of social capital in the relations with social resources and people's lifestyle such as nationhood association, and community activities. We adopted social survey, experiment, computer simulation, fieldwork as a method of this research. Also, we conducted interview survey in January, 2004. We interviewed 707 people out of 1000 who were randomly sampled. This is the first full-fledged interview survey on social capital in Japan, and therefore it provides basic insights on social capital in Japanese society. Having used other empirical methods together, we obtained the following findings :1)As the results of concentrated analysis of trust, the main component of social capital, the trust generating process which is described in the leading theory, "Emancipation theory of … More trust", was not confirmed.2)For general trust to be generated, commitment formation to intermediary groups such as neighborhoods association, voluntary participation to clubs, plays important roles. Information based trust which is developed in this kind of intermediary groups provide a solid base for trust toward people in general. This process is confirmed by co-variance analyses and computer simulations.3)The concept of "a whole-net base" was introduced in order to make a distinction between social capital and its generating process by investing and recovering resources. In addition, using social survey data in Kinki district, we confirmed the role of a whole-net base.4)These results of the research project were reported in journal articles, books, and also at an international conference (Japanese-German Frontiers of Science (JGFoS). Further, the reports of the results of this project provided the central contributions to a symposium held at the 39^<th> meeting of Japanese Association for Mathematical Sociology Less