Structural Relationships among Social Capital, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction in Multicultural Adolescents

Abstract

This study examined how social capital in proximal contexts—the family, peer group, school, and community—was associated with self-esteem and life satisfaction among multicultural adolescents, and tested the mediating role of self-esteem in the relationship between social capital and life satisfaction. Data were drawn from 1,833 eighth-grade multicultural adolescents who participated in the fifth wave of the second cohort of the Multicultural Adolescents Panel Study (MAPS). Structural equation modeling was employed. The results showed that parental monitoring, parent–child interaction, friend support, number of friends, and the size of school-based adult support networks were positively associated with self-esteem, whereas community-based adult support networks were not significantly associated with self-esteem. Among the social capital variables, only friend support had a significant direct effect on life satisfaction. Parental monitoring, parent–child interaction, friend support, number of friends, and school-based adult support networks had significant indirect effects on life satisfaction through self-esteem, whereas community-based adult support networks did not. These findings suggest that the associations between social capital and life satisfaction vary across proximal contexts and that self-esteem plays a central mediating role in these associations.