The Korea Local Administration Review

The purpose of this study is to qualitatively examine the function of localsocial capital in addressing the problems of the elderly from a perspective ofsocial constructionism. Towards this purpose, this study focused on socialcapital of communities and a local government and analyzed how social capitalresponds to them. In order to examine the contexts and the paths of socialcapital in detail, this study chose Seongbuk-gu as a target of single subjectresearch.As a result of analysis, it is found that diverse types of social capital workto address the problems of the elderly in many ways, which are determined byunits of local social capital and the characteristics of the subgroup of theelderly. For the problem of a group of the active elderly, weak bonding socialcapital in the community of the elderly and strong linking social capital betweenthe elderly’s community and local government responded to it. However, it wasdifficult for the active elderly to make their problem a local agenda byparticipating in a community of residents. On the other hand, for the problem ofa group of the excluded elderly, strong bonding social capital of a community ofresidents and strong bridging social capital of ‘welfare community’ responded toit.This study provides a few implications for policy design. First, since a groupof the elderly is actually divided into several subgroups, it would be moreeffective to support the excluded elderly in developing their own community inorder to recover their social capital. Also, for responding to serious problemsof the excluded elderly, social capital between the elderly and residents, orsocial capital between communities might be more important. At last, it is
suggested for a local government to set up an appropriate institution or norm atthe beginning in order to improve cooperation between communities.
□ Keywords: Social capital, Aging problem, Local social capital, Social construction