Social Capital and Health Outcomes of Elderly People - Social Capital and Health Outcomes of Elderly People - Open Access Pub

Greater social capital has been shown to be associated with improved mental health, general wellbeing and reduced risk of premature mortality, cancer mortality and cardiovascular mortality. However, most of these studies found a positive relationship between social capital and health are limited to descriptive studies. This project is performing a theoretical approach to the role of social capital in producing health outcome based on Becker’s household production function. We are testing whether social capital has a positive impact on health both directly through a more effective production of health and indirectly through utilizing the health care system better, using several measurements of social capital from ‘social support’ module in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2008 for a sample of those 60 years old and above. NHANES is a unique data set in terms of collecting both subjective self-rated health status and several objective health outcome measurement through medical and laboratory examination. Finding from 2SLS with instrumental variable was a bit surprising – various social capital measures do not show significant results in different experiments. The only exception is that more resources of emotional support can promote better overall health status. DOI10.14302/issn.2474-7785.jarh-17-1886 “Why treat people’s illness without changing what makes them sick in the first place?” World Health Organization poses this question, suggesting that without modifying the social determinants of health, health care and medicine may be useless 1. Social determinants of health examines why, in countries all over the world, there is a social gradient when it comes to health status and outcomes. Individuals higher up in the social hierarchy consistently have better health outcomes than those lower down. Social capital was explored as a social determinant of health in the public health domain and has become a popular topic in the past decade particularly with the publication of Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000). Robert Putnam defined social capital as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity, which is inhering both in the individual and the collective 2, 3. Ichiro Kawachi attempted to normalized definitions and methodologies of measurement of social capital in the health field 4, 5. In Kawachi’s definition, social capital can be examined as a group or community-level characteristic, called “social cohesion”, or as an individual characteristic using network theory. He also separated bonding and bridging social capital.