Social trust and satisfaction with life: A cross-lagged panel analysis based on representative samples from 18 societies

Abstract

This study examined the longitudinal associations between two types of social trust and satisfaction with life. Trust in community, an individual-level trust in a less intimate circle of people with shared physical and/or symbolic group membership, is proposed side by side with trust in close relations, which captures trust in one's intimate circle of people. Using two-wave representative samples from 18 societies with a six-month interval (N = 8587), I first conducted measurement invariance tests and then a cross-lagged panel analysis to examine the associations. Results showed that all latent variables were metrically invariant across countries and across time. Trust in community, but not trust in close relations, had a positive longitudinal association with satisfaction with life. The reverse associations were also found, where satisfaction with life was longitudinally associated with both types of social trust. These findings may help to clarify the causality of the link between social trust and well-being and suggest the two-factor model of social trust is a robust and useful tool in cross-national well-being research.

Keywords: Cross-lagged panel model; Satisfaction with life; Social capital; Social trust.