The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the perception of social conflict and that of distributive justice on welfare attitude, and furthermore, to empirically grasp the causal structure between the perception of social conflict and welf...
The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the perception of social conflict and that of distributive justice on welfare attitude, and furthermore, to empirically grasp the causal structure between the perception of social conflict and welfare attitude by setting the perception of distributive justice as a mediating variable. For the analysis, structural equation modeling analysis (AMOS) was conducted, and the mediating effect of the perception of distributive justice was analyzed by setting an indirect path where the perception of social conflict, an independent variable, reaches welfare attitude via the perception of distributive justice.
This study was conducted from April 1, 2014 to April 20, 2014, for approx. 3 weeks, targeting people aged between 20 and 60, residing in Anyang, Gyeonggi-do, through a self-reported survey. And stratified sampling (disproportional) was selected so that gender, age, and job could be evenly distributed.
The study results are as below.
Looking at the difference of welfare attitude according to socio-demographic characteristics, it turned out that men have higher welfare attitude than women. This result is different from existing reports that women show higher pro-welfare attitude compared to men due to family care or discrimination in the labor market. However, most domestic researches have contended that men have higher pro-welfare attitude as this study result, though the difference is small or not significant. Therefore, the contention that gender influences welfare attitude is not valid anymore. This result may be related to the aspect of social changes such as the recently increased educational level and social participation of women and the increased common consciousness of men and women regarding care.
According to marital status, excluding others, it turned out that divorce and separation have the highest welfare attitude, followed by cohabitation and single, in order. According to occupational position, full-time position turned out to have higher welfare attitude than temporary position. According to job, college student turned out to have the highest welfare attitude, followed by simple labor, office job, unemployment and housewife, technical post, and civil servant, in order. In addition, according to pension, those with no pension turned out to have the highest welfare attitude and those with more than two pensions have the lowest welfare attitude. This result conflicts with researches raising a question about the cleavage of classes, and this study implies that the class/hierarchical status still influences welfare attitude.
Next, as a result of analyzing the effect of the perception of social conflict on welfare attitude, it turned out that the perception of social conflict has no direct effect on welfare attitude. In spite of the contention of preceding researches that there is a close relationship between the perception of social conflict and welfare attitude, this study shows that recognizing social conflict highly does not directly influence welfare attitude. This result indicates that in order for the perception of social conflict, an independent variable, to influence welfare attitude, a dependent variable, a third variable that can work as an adjusting mechanism is needed.
And as a result of analyzing the effect of the perception of social conflict on distributive justice, it could be found that the perception of social conflict influences that of distributive justice. One thing that should be noted in this result is that, among the three aspects of distributive justice, while the perception of social conflict has a relatively high correlation with equality and desert, it has a low correlation with desire. This is a meaningful result that implies the criterion for distributive justice perceived by citizens, which may be related to welfare disputes in our present society. In other words, although the perception of conflict due to social inequality is high, that desire does not lead to universal welfare that provides free welfare for all people.
And as a result of analyzing the relationship between the perception of distributive justice and welfare attitude, it could be found that the perception of distributive justice strongly influences welfare attitude. This result indicates that higher perception of distributive justice results in higher pro-welfare attitude. Therefore, it should be important to study how our society, which is experiencing severe social conflicts, is recognizing the criterion for fair distribution that can contribute to resolving the problem of inequality and polarization. In addition, it should be very meaningful to study how that influences welfare attitude.
Lastly, the following is the results of analyzing the mediating effect of distributive justice between the perception of social conflict and welfare attitude. The biggest problem of the capitalistic market system resides in inequality and unfairness. The purpose of this study was, by examining the mediating effect of distributive justice in the relationship between the perception of social conflict and welfare attitude, to solve the problem of whether the perception of distributive justice could work as an adjusting mechanism between the perception of social conflict and welfare attitude. The criterion for fair distribution is called ‘distributive justice’, and it is a very difficult task to specify what kind of distribution is fair distribution. In order to solve this problem, a criterion for distributive justice was set and its perception was examined.
As a result of the analysis, it turned out that the perception of social conflict does not directly influence welfare attitude but influences it through the perception of distributive justice, which shows the full mediating effect of the perception of distributive justice. This result implies that social values such as distributive justice are very important in forming pro-welfare att