부산대학교 도서관

As rural areas have been facing threats in terms of environmental, economic, and social aspects, such as population loss, insufficient infrastructure, as well as liberalization of global trade, it is a challenging task to maintain and implement rural sustainability in Taiwan. Previous studies on rural sustainability, however, have been careless in defining the difference between 'sustainable development' and 'sustainability', or short of rigorous indicators and insufficient data on rural communities, partially due to absence of sustainability indicators focusing on rural areas. Therefore, this study aims to measure and investigate the sustainability status of rural Taiwan through creating stock indicators of sustainability. Relying on the Community Capitals Framework as the theoretical basis, the current study intends to answer such questions as: What are the latent structures of sustainability in rural Taiwan? Whether and how are such latent dimensions correlated? We draw data from the first- (2019) and second- (2021) wave of the General Questionnaire Surveys from a research project, 'A Social and Cultural Survey of Rural Taiwan', which contains 2,528 survey respondents. The first step creates rural sustainability indices through 32 factor items. We then follow with a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and a structural equation model (SEM) to examine the associations among natural capital, cultural capital, human capital, social capital, political capital, economic capital, and build capital. The findings confirmed several significantly positive correlations among them. Social capital, in particular, exerted positive covariances with other community capitals, indicating that social capital plays an important role that links up different dimensions of rural assets. In addition, cultural capital and political capital, as well as build capital and economic and human capital, are positively and significantly correlated, suggesting a close relationship between human, economic, and cultural resources and the buildup of rural facilities.