SOCIAL CAPITAL AND HAPPINESS AT YOUTH IN SOCIAL RISK.

Numerous studies show that high levels of social capital are associated with higher level of happiness around the world. However, it is not known whether this association extends to young people at social risk. It is essential for this people to be in a state of positive feelings and satisfaction in order to thrive and leave healthier. A huge deficiency is the lack of research on the subject for this group of people in Republic of North Macedonia and it is very important to make national analysis because of the cultural differences between the countries that can produce different conclusions. Also, it is not known which indicators of the broad concept of social capital are associated with happiness at youth in social risk. Social capital is a complex multidimensional concept without unified definition. One easy way to explain the social capital is through benefits that arise from social activity of one individual. Among many distinctions of social capital are distinctions of structural and cognitive social capital and distinction based on relationships such as strong, weak, vertical, horizontal, bonding, bridging or linking. In this paper, we took the distinction of structural and cognitive social capital. We examine the association between different types of individual structural social capital and individual cognitive social capital with level of happiness at youth in social risk. Therefore, the subject of this paper is to examine social capital and its different dimensions and their association to happiness of youth in social risk. Main goal of this paper is to determine which dimensions of individual social capital are positively associated with happiness among youth in social risk. Thus, paper hypothesis is: structural and cognitive dimensions of social capital are positively associated with happiness among youth in social risk. Data is gathered through conducted survey on youth in social risk from 16 to 35 years in February 2022. These youth are participants in project "Youth empowerment enabling prospects", which goal is to increase the employability and find employment for youth in social risk. The project is operating in four cities in Republic of North Macedonia: Skopje, Tetovo, Prilep and Bitola. The data comes only from project participants in the city of Skopje. Out of 140 project participants in Skopje, 75 gave valid answers to the questionnaire which was consisted of 13 questions about demographics, happiness and social capital. The individual structural social capital is measured as bonding and bridging network of people and network frequency, while individual cognitive social capital is measured by quality of social relationships through trust, receiving and giving social support, positive and negative experience with others. Happiness is measured through self-perceived happiness at the moment. We first use Ordinary Least Square regression to model happiness as a function of different proxies of individual structural and cognitive social capital, controlling for age, education and income. The results of the first regression analysis suggest no statistical significance. Because of the results in the first regression, second multiple linear regression was developed via method of eliminating independent variables which had lowest level of statistical significance. After excluding age, trust, positive and negative experience with others, number of different friends and frequency of time spent with different friends, new regression model results were obtained. The results from the second regression analysis suggests that level of education and receiving social support from friends are the only variables that have statistical significance and are positively associated with level of happiness. Receiving social support variable is positively correlated with variable frequency of bonding social capital, which means that the latter is associated with greater level of happiness. Therefore, the results from the regression analysis confirm the hypothesis that some dimensions of cognitive and structural social capital are positively associated with happiness among youth in social risk. This paper shows that in order to increase level of happiness of youth in social risk, activities should be taken to increase social support among youth in social risk as peer to peer support, increase level of education and increase frequency of time spent with friends that have similar socioeconomic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]