Social exclusion, Depression, and Daily Support Services among users of Community Center in Korea

1. Background and Purpose

‘Social exclusion' indicates multidimensional aspects of poverty which was not explained by conventional concept of poverty by which expressed monetary term. According to Room(1999), social exclusion presents poverty more ‘mutidimensionally' and ‘dynamically'. By emerging demand for considering mechanism of poverty, researchers are recommended to study poverty from perspective of social exclusion. Also social service should be a major theme in a discussion considering how excluded people can be socially included. Despite many prior studies have focused the relation between poverty and depression, not much attention has been paid to social exclusion. In addition, researchers rarely had tested direct effect and moderating effect of ‘daily support services' on depression. So, in this study, the relationship will be scrutinized from perspective of social exclusion. And effect of using social services provided by community center will be tested. With this study, we may understand poverty in a broader sense and make sense of the relationship between poverty and depression. Moreover we would recommend future direction for policy and actual provision of ‘daily support services'.

2. Methods

The study was conducted using secondary data from the survey of "Dynamics of Community Social Service Providers and Social Inclusion in the Era of Localization" (N=1600). Data was collected from 51 community centers located in nation-wide and approximately 30 respondents were obtained from each of them. To measure social exclusion, a scale developed by Center for Social Welfare Research at Yonsei University (2007) was used. Construct validity was proved by factor analysis and criterion validity was tested in comparison with formal research by Kang et al. (2006) which formally studied social exclusion in Korea(Jung, 2007). Use of daily support services from the centers was coded as a dummy variable (1=yes, 0=no) and depression was measured with CES-D which is considered as one of the most reliable measurement. Association of 4 dimensions of social exclusion - ‘social relation', ‘productivity', ‘political engagement', and ‘consumption' - and depression were studied. We also analyzed moderating effect of ‘daily support services' with Ping's method which is considered to be appropriate analysis method in Structural Equation Model. By using SEM, we expect to exclude measurement errors.

3. Results

This study has the following findings: (1) Correlations between depression and each dimension of social exclusion are statistically significant; (2) in the SEM, political engagement is not statistically significant, while other dimensions are statistically significant factors predicting depression; (3) in the SEM, moderating effect of ‘daily support services' usage are supported.

4. Implication and conclusion

This study revealed that ‘daily support services' is major factor which decreases negative effect of social exclusion on depression. Moreover, exclusion in social relation or participation in productive roles is major factor predicting depression as well as material poverty. Therefore, this study implies that further policy and provision of services to alleviate negative effect of poverty should not restrict to material aspects of it. Policy makers or service providers need to endeavor their clients to be included in a society with programs considering multidimensionality of poverty.