PHA-Exchange> Social capital, place and health

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

 from "Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC)" <ruglucia at PAHO.ORG> -----

Social capital, place and health: creating, validating and applying
small-area indicators in the modelling of health outcomes

John Mohan, Steve Barnard, Kelvyn Jones and Liz Twigg
Institute for the Geography of Health, University of Portsmouth
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

Website:
http://www.hda-online.org.uk/Documents/socialcapital_place_health.pdf 

A growing body of research contends that the place in which you live
makes a difference to health-related behaviour and its outcomes. Health
outcomes thus depend not only on individual characteristics (age,
gender, occupation, etc) but also on the 'ecology', or the surrounding
environment in which individuals live and work. The supporting evidence
for this proposition includes:

* Differences in health profiles between places with broadly similar
socio-economic profiles 

* Occupational differences in health status that appear to be wider in
some geographical contexts than in others 

* Small but significant amounts of between-area variations in ill-health
which remain unexplained at most scales of analysis 

* Associations between area type (as revealed by classifications of
census data) and unexplained high or low rates of health or premature
mortality 

While statistical associations can therefore be demonstrated, it is less
easy to describe the actual mechanisms whereby residence in an area
affects health.

Because of this uncertainty, Macintyre and Ellaway (2003: 25) suggest
that it 'has almost been an article of faith' that geographical
variations in health are merely the result of compositional effects
rather than contextual factors, and much of the debate about
geographical variations in health has featured these competing schools
of thought. 

Introduction 
Chapter 1: Social capital, geography and health 
Chapter 2: An ecological analysis of relationships between income
inequality, social capital and mortality for England
Chapter 3: Small-area indicators of social capital: an evaluation of
some possibilities for direct measurement
Chapter 4: Developing small-area measures of social capital through
synthetic estimation techniques
Chapter 5: Direct and indirect measures of social capital: an evaluation
Chapter 6: Modelling the relationship between social capital, place and
health
Chapter 7: Conclusions and policy implications 
References 


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