Social capital, the miniaturization of community, traditionalism and mortality: A population-based prospective cohort study in southern Sweden

Navigating trust and health in India: the influence of social status and neighbourhood environment

BACKGROUND

The research on the relationship between interpersonal trust and health has primarily focused on Western contexts, with scarce attention in developing contexts. Addressing this gap, the study examines the association between interpersonal trust (both generalised and particularised) and health outcomes (self-rated health /SRH, and depression) among Indian adults, considering the moderating roles of social statuses (gender and caste) and macro-level factors like district-level income inequality.

METHODS

The study draws on data from the World Health Organization's (WHO) Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) Wave-1, collected between 2007 and 2010. This dataset provides a comprehensive overview of health outcomes, including self-rated health (SRH) and depression, socio-cultural status of adults aged 18 and above in India. Additionally, district-level data on income inequality, quantified through the Gini index, were incorporated to examine the influence of contextual socioeconomic influence on the trust-health relationship. Multilevel regression analysis with interaction effects with social statuses and income inequality at district was employed in the analysis to investigate the intricate relationship between interpersonal trust (both generalised and particularised) and health outcomes.

RESULTS

The study reveals that while generalised trust does not directly influence depression or SRH, particularised trust acts as a protective factor for both health outcomes. Gender-specific interaction effect shows that generalised trust reduces depression among males and improves SRH among females. Notably, caste does not significantly moderate the trust-health relationship. High district-level income inequality, however, modifies these associations: generalised trust is associated with improved SRH in areas of high inequality, whereas particularised trust correlates with increased depression in these districts.

CONCLUSION

The findings highlight the complex dynamics between interpersonal trust, social status, and income inequality in shaping health outcomes in India. Generalised trust emerges as a potential buffer against the health-detrimental effects of income inequality, providing crucial insights for developing targeted health interventions. These results offer valuable guidance for global health policymakers and practitioners in effectively allocating development aid to enhance health outcomes, especially among the most marginalised groups.

Psychosocial stress and social capital pathways and health: Perspectives from Lund University, Malmö

AIMS

The aim of this Commentary is to outline a few steps of the process by which psychosocial stress and later social capital have been investigated as health determinants at Lund University, Malmö since the 1980s. References to the international literature and literature from Malmö from the mid-1980s and onwards will be used.

RESULTS

The development of research on psychosocial factors and social capital has followed international progress, with a complementary focus on social capital from the late 1990s onwards. Social participation, entailing a number of social activities, seems to be both the common connection between psychosocial stress theory and social capital and the common denominator between cohesion and structural/network approaches to social capital and health.

CONCLUSIONS

The impact of this research area has been considerable in Sweden. Both psychosocial factors and social capital have been acknowledged as health determinants in national Swedish health policy, although a setback may be discerned in recent years.

Social capital, population health, and the gendered statistics of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality

Scholars in the field of population health need to be on the constant lookout for the danger that their tacit ideological commitments translate into systematic biases in how they interpret their empirical results. This contribution illustrates this problematic by critically interrogating a set of concepts such as tradition, trust, social capital, community, or gender, that are routinely used in population health research even though they carry a barely acknowledged political and ideological load. Alongside this wider deconstruction of loaded concepts, I engage critically but constructively with Martin Lindström et al.'s paper “Social capital, the miniaturization of community, traditionalism and mortality: A population-based prospective cohort study in southern Sweden” to evaluate the extent to which it fits with other empirical findings in the extant literature. Taking as a point of departure the intriguing finding that social capital predicts cardiovascular and all-cause mortality only for men, but not for women, I argue that future research on the nexus of social capital, health, and mortality needs to frame gender not only as a demographic and statistical variable, but also as an ontological conundrum and as an epistemological sensibility.