What can we talk about social cohesion in Korea? An item response theory approach

There has been increasing demand for a reliable measurement method for social cohesion for scientific analysis, but due to the difficulty in multidimensional measurement, the search is in progress. In order to tackle the problem, the paper applies the Item Response Theory approach to measure social cohesion in a way that can give answers to both multidimensionality and interpretability problem simultaneously. Applying the method to Korea Social Integration Survey data, it is shown that the people’s attitude toward social cohesion is more positive than just neutral position, which can be translated that Korean people perceived social cohesion in the society rather positively, though the distribution shows that there are small numbers of people whose view on social cohesion is extremely negative. Also, it can be said that the measured attitude varies significantly over diverse demographic characteristics like age or urban/rural regions. Finally, taking advantage of regression method in investigating important factors for the attitude toward social cohesion, it is found that age and occupation exert significant impact on social cohesion. Still, additional advantages of the method certainly warrant further research.