2009, Vol.1, No.22

Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.39

pISSN : 1598-4230 / eISSN : 2586-7601
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ihss

This study investigates the relationship between the quality of life and social capital. Both have been among the most important subjects in the social science fields during the last 30 years. Previous research has found a strong correlation between the two. To date, empirical outcomes have shown that social capital exerted a positive impact upon employment, emotional stability, local autonomy and democracy, and solving social problems. These results confirmed the ability of social capital to act as a spur to a more satisfactory life and provide a higher quality of life. I have defined social capital as a combination of civic participation, trust, and social resource, and inserted them into the regression equation to analyze the relationship. As a control for this analysis, I also added equations of variables such as socio-economic status like income and education, health status like subjective judgment on physical health and psycho-somatic response, and other family-demographic factors like gender, age, marriage status, residential area, and parents' relationship during childhood. After controlling for the socio-economic status, health status, and family-demographic variables, social capital variables all had statistically significant effects on the subjective satisfaction with life. However, the levels of trust and civic (or public interest oriented) participation were lower than desired. These findings present two implications. First, the principal agents of community development should exert a more serious effort in supporting the growth of civic organizations. Education for civil society is the key option to achieve this. Second, to improve public trust, we need to foster a partnership between local governments and civic organizations. Generally, the development of western society is regarded as the process of replacing private trust by public trust and the decline of closed private networks.

This study analyzed the political contents of lawmakers' homepages from the perspective of justice principles. I determined the frequency that three principles of justice appeared in the lawmakers' homepages through contents analysis of the lawmakers' homepages for cultivating citizenship. Lawmakers should contribute to advancing political culture in their homepage through two-way communication with citizens. In this paper, I analyzed the Lawmakers' homepages according to the equality oriented, average oriented, and concession oriented principles of justice. Most lawmakers are trying to communicate with citizens in terms of the average oriented principle of justice in their homepages. Because civil society needs much more concession virtue in order to advance the democratic political development, lawmakers need to focus more on communicating concession oriented principles of justice to citizens for cultivating citizenship.

This paper studied the formality and substance of the citizenship education to realize the value of democracy in terms of the focus on rationality and morality. Focusing on a discussion is to study the orientation and ideas, the subject and object and educational goal that are concerned about the citizen's conscious of the community and nature's cultivation of democratic citizens. In the study results, citizenship education was related to and affected by the citizens' conscious of the community and nature's cultivation of democratic citizens. Citizens' conscious of the community initially had little effect on the rationality of decision making. Nature's cultivation of democratic citizens had little effect on the morality of citizenship education. The rationality of decision making builds a cultivation democratic process and the ability of the problem solving and the morality of citizenship education is to accomplish the right and duty in which is internalizing a dignity of human. As a result, citizens' cultivation of community includes the citizens' education to the rationality, which is based to focusing on the formality, and the morality of nature of democratic citizens is practicing education which is establishing the method of standards. In conclusion, citizenship education for value realization of the democracy is the ability of rational decision making in which is solving social problems, and is internalization which is realizing a human dignity for the value of morality. Citizenship education is recognized as a foundational element to realize the democratic values of rationality and morality.