Abstract
BackgroundDisease-causing poverty is a serious problem in rural China, where social capital can mediate the disease—poverty relationship. However, there is no generally accepted reliable, robust and viable measure of social capital for China’s unique socio-cultural context. This study adapts for China the widely used Onyx and Bullen social capital measurement scale and tests the validity and reliability of a modified Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale, the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale, for a disease-causing-poverty subpopulation in rural China.MethodsWe conducted the forward and backward translation procedure and cross-cultural adaptation process to derive the 34 item Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale. Next we collected through face-to face interviews a sample of disease-causing poverty population in rural Shandong province in China to test a 29 item modified Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale for a health subpopulation. Most of the rural respondents had no formal work, so 5 work-related items in the Onyx-Bullen general scale were deleted in the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the structure, validity, internal consistency and reliability of the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale. SPSS21.0 software was used for data analysis.ResultsA total of 467 people completed the scale. For the 29-item scale, a better simple structure was found when the number of factors was limited to 8. The absolute values of inter-factor correlations were in the range of 0.004 to 0.213 and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.834. All the eight factors explain a total of 59.51% of the variance. The total scale had a Cronbach’s alpha = 0.868, in which seven of the eight factors had Cronbach’s α greater than 0.5.ConclusionThe Chinese health version of the Onyx-Bullen general social capital scale showed an adequate reliability and validity in a rural disease-causing poverty subpopulation in Shandong province, providing the first general, robust, consistent and reliable measure of social capital in China. The Chinese Onyx-Bullen general social capital scale provides a scale for testing social capital in China or for modification along the lines of the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale.
Highlights
Disease-causing poverty is a serious problem in rural China, where social capital can mediate the disease—poverty relationship
The first step was a forward-backward translation and cultural adaption process to modify the Onyx-Bullen scale for China, deriving the 34 item Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale
The Chinese Onyx-Bullen health social capital scale showed an adequate reliability and validity when used in a disease-related poverty people in Shandong province
Summary
Disease-causing poverty is a serious problem in rural China, where social capital can mediate the disease—poverty relationship. This study adapts for China the widely used Onyx and Bullen social capital measurement scale and tests the validity and reliability of a modified Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale, the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale, for a disease-causing-poverty subpopulation in rural China. Health and poverty Social capital is a powerful concept informing social science and health research. The poverty-social capital-health relationship has argued that poverty and income inequality erode social capital and breed poor health outcomes [24,25,26]. Poverty caused by death or disability due to disease of the household income earner is measured by the official poverty line, defined as households that had a per capita income lower than RMB683 in
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