A Multilevel Perspective on the Health Effect of Social Capital: Evidence for the Relative Importance of Individual Social Capital over Neighborhood Social Capital

Susan Lagaert,Wim Hardyns,Sara Willems,Veerle Vyncke,Lieven J. R. Pauwels,Thom Snaphaan

doi:10.3390/ijerph18041526

Abstract

Employing a multilevel perspective on the health effects of social capital, this study analyzes how individual and neighborhood differences in self-rated health in Ghent (Belgium), relate to individual and collective social mechanisms, when taking demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of individuals into account. This study estimates the health effects of social trust, informal social control and disorder at the neighborhood level and social support and network size at the individual level, using indicators indebted to both the normative and resource-based approaches to social capital. Instead of the mere aggregation of individual indicators of social capital, this study uses the key informant technique as a methodologically superior measurement of neighborhood social capital, which combined with a multilevel analysis strategy, allows to disentangle the health effects of individual and neighborhood social capital. The analysis highlights the health benefits of individual social capital, i.e., individual social support and network size. The study indicates that controlling for individual demographic and socioeconomic characteristics reduces the effect of the neighborhood-level counterparts and the neighborhood characteristics social trust and neighborhood disorder have significant, but small health effects. In its effects on self-rated health, social capital operates on the individual level, rather than the neighborhood level.

Highlights

In the last decades, there has been a burgeoning academic interest in neighborhood effects on health on health [1,2]
Drawing on Bourdieusian and Putnamian social capital theory, collective efficacy theory and broken windows theory, this study focuses on the health effects of neighborhood social trust, informal social control and disorder at the neighborhood level and social support and network size at the individual level
This study contributes to the growing literature on the health effects of neighborhood characteristics, by presenting an application of a multilevel perspective on social capital [2]

Summary

Introduction

There has been a burgeoning academic interest in neighborhood effects on health on health [1,2]. The increasing scientific attention in public health research to how the neighborhood context affects a person’s health status is necessary as research underlines a clear spatial clustering of problems of health and wellbeing in certain neighborhoods within cities across the world [3,4,5,6,7]. Neighborhood characteristics, such as deprivation, are shown to negatively correlate with various health outcomes, including life expectancy [8,9], mental health problems [3] and self-rated health [10,11]. Researchers have looked at social resources and how they might explain health differences between neighborhoods [2,3,14,15,16,17]

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Conclusion