The role of religious capital in shaping wellbeing of individuals

Abstract

Abstract By investigating the role of religiosity in shaping Human Well-being, this study bridges the gap through quantitative study on the importance of religious capital to enhance people’s level of well-being. This research emphasized the relation of social exclusion and religious capital to wellbeing, whereas previous studies generally used individual and economic factors as the basis. Due to large sample size of 757 people, this quantitative research using Divine Economic Survey 2013 data looks at how religious capital affects people's subjective well-being. To minimize the diversity of subjective well-being, prayers, and religious activities, constructing them continuous and escaping the problem of multicollinearity and emphasizing the key underlying factors that most effectively capture the variance in these variables, therefore we have adopted principal component analysis. The ordinary least squares approach is then used to regress the variables and evaluate the links between subjective wellbeing and rituals, religious practices, gender health, general education. household size, and marital status of individuals. The finding reveals that religious rituals, gender, age, general education, health, and log of income are statistically significant and have a positive influence on subjective well-being, but Household Members and Marital Status are statistically significant and negatively affect the subjective well-being of human-being. The study is beneficial for government agencies that would make the policies and programs to augment people’s income, educational prospects and health facilities and services.

Keywords

• Subjective wellbeing and rituals
• Quantitative survey
• Gender health
• Religious capital
• Household size