Abstract
BackgroundSocial capital is a multilevel construct impacting health. Community level social capital, beyond the neighborhood, has received relatively less attention. Moreover, the measurement of community level social capital has tended to make use of aggregated individual data, rather than observable community characteristics.MethodsHerein, metropolitan religious adherence, as an observable community-level measure of social capital, is used. We match it to city of residence for 2826 women in the Fragile Families Childhood Wellbeing Study (a cohort study) who have lived continuously in that city during a nine-year period. Using ordered logistic regression with clustered standard errors to account for area effects, we look at the relationship between metropolitan religious adherence and self-rated health, while controlling for lagged individual, neighborhood, and socioeconomic factors, as well as individual level religious attendance.ResultsReligious adherence at the community level is positive and statistically significant; every 1% increase in area religiosity corresponds to a 1.2% increase in the odds of good health.ConclusionsThese findings shed light on a possible pathway by which social capital may improve health, perhaps acting as a stress buffer or through spillover effects of reciprocity generated by exposure to religion.
Highlights
Social capital is a multilevel construct impacting health
Within the public health literature, social capital is frequently conceptualized as a subset of social cohesion, a larger concept referring to the closeness and solidarity
We expand upon the current literature by incorporating an observable measure of religious social capital acting at the community level. We investigate this relationship among women across 20 different metropolitan areas of the U.S participating in the Fragile Families and Childhood Wellbeing (FFCWB) study by matching metropolitan religious adherence rate to the women’s city of residence
Summary
Social capital is a multilevel construct impacting health. Beyond the neighborhood, has received relatively less attention. The measurement of community level social capital has tended to make use of aggregated individual data, rather than observable community characteristics. Social capital is a multilevel construct composed of both individual (social networks, participation in social and civic organizations) and contextual community factors (social cohesion of neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions; the economic environment; organizations available to address social welfare; funding levels), that, when taken together can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action [1]. Dauner and Wilmot BMC Public Health (2019) 19:1184 including coronary heart disease [11] and mortality [12], a recent assessment of the literature found that observational designs and multilevel models tended to show small, statistically significant effects of the neighborhood but point out that, while rare, studies that use experimental methodologies tend to find more mixed results [13]. It is not surprising that many have called for measures at multiple levels and capturing structural and collective social function attributes [5, 15,16,17]
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