Abstract
This study examined the relationship between reciprocity among community dwelling adults and self-rated health by analyzing data from a survey conducted every 5 years between 1991 and 2011 in Japan. The results revealed a downward trend in reciprocity at the group level over the 20-year survey period, but little change in reciprocity at the individual level. A comparison of different surveyed cohorts showed that the younger the generation, the lower the group-level reciprocity. A multi-level analysis controlling for age, gender, educational status and marital status showed that both at the individual and group levels, higher reciprocity was associated with higher self-rated health. However, there was an interaction effect involving reciprocity at two levels: a stronger correlation between individual reciprocity and self-rated health was observed for individuals from a recent cohort with a low level of group reciprocity. This paper concludes by discussing the factors to consider when examining the influence of reciprocity on self-rated health.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
L. F. Berkman and S. L. Syme “Social networks, host resistance, and mortality: A nine-year follow-up study of Alameda County residents”, American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 109, pp. 186 – 204, 1979.
S. Cohen and T. A. Wills, “Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis”, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 98, pp. 310 – 357, 1985.
K. McKenzie and T. Harpham, “Meanings and uses of social capital in the mental health field”, in Social Capital and Mental Health, K. McKenzie and T. Harpham, Eds. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006, pp. 11 – 23.
R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
I. Kawachi, B. P. Kennedy, K. Lochner, and D. Prothrow-Stith, “Social capital, income inequality, and mortality”, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 87, pp. 1491 – 1498, 1997.
I. Kawachi, B. P. Kennedy, and R. Glass, “Social capital and self-rated health: A contextual analysis”, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 89, pp. 1187 – 1193, 1999.
A. K. Forsman, F. Nyqvist, and K. Wahlbeck, “Cognitive components of social capital and mental health status among older adults: A population-based cross-sectional study”, Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, vol. 39, pp. 757 – 765, 2011.
M. Kimura, Y. Yamazaki, M. Sato, Y. Yonekura, Y. Yokoyama, R. Otemori, et al., “The relationships between mental health and community participation / social capital among middle-aged women with high school-age children [in Japanese]”, Shakai Igaku Kenkyu, vol. 27, pp. 35 – 44, 2009.
N. Ichida, G. Yoshikawa, H. Hirai, K. Kondo, and S. Kobayashi, “The health of the aged and social capital: Multilevel analysis: Using data of 9,248 aged people living in 28 school districts in Chita peninsula [in Japanese]”, Journal of the Association of Rural Planning, vol. 24, pp. 277 – 282, 2005.
T. Mamada, “Social capital and health studies in Japan: Present and future [in Japanese]”, Bulletin of Aichi Prefectural University School of Nursing and Health, vol. 16, pp. 1 – 7, 2010.
S. V. Subramanian, D. J. Kim, and I. Kawachi, “Social trust and selfrated health in US communities: A multilevel analysis”, Journal of Urban Health Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 79 (Suppl 1), pp. S21 – S34, 2002.
A. W. Gouldner, “The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement”, American Sociological Review, vol. 25, pp. 161 – 178, 2013.
M. A. Nowak and K. Sigmund, “Social science. Shrewd investments”, Science, vol. 288, pp. 819 – 820, 2000.
I. Kreft and J. De Leeuw, Introducing Multilevel Modeling. London: Sage, 1998.
J. W. Snelgrove, H. Pikhart, and M. Stafford, “A multilevel analysis of social capital and self-rated health: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey”, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 68, pp. 1993 – 2001, 2009.
T. Hamano, Y. Fujisawa, Y. Ishida, S. V. Subramanian, I. Kawachi, and K. Shiwaku, “Social capital and mental health in Japan: A multilevel analysis”, PLoS ONE, vol. 5 [Online Article], 2010.
E. Kobayashi and J. Liang, “Changes induced by aging and cohort differences in old people’s social network [in Japanese]”, Shakaigaku Hyoron, vol. 62, pp. 356 – 374, 2011.
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities [Online Article in Japanese]”, Available: http://www.stat.go.jp/data/shakai/2011/pdf/gaiyou.pdf, 2012
M. De Silvia, “Systematic review of the methods used in studies of social capital and mental health”, Social Capital and Mental Health, K. McKenzie and T. Harpham, Eds. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006, pp. 39 – 67.
Mizuho Institute Research, “The Japanese population as seen in the latest census [Online Article in Japanese], Available: http://www.mizuho-ri.co.jp/publication/research/insight, 2011.
S. Tamura, “An analysis of social capital factors that influence on children’s healh [Online Article in Japanese]”, Available: http://www3.grips.ac.jp/~education/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/material6.pdf, 2014.
T. Asakura, “Neighborhood environment quality, individual-level social capital, and depressive symptoms among adolescents [in Japanese]”, Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi, vol. 58, pp. 754 – 767, 2011.
A. Portes, “Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 24, pp. 1 – 24, 1998.
E. Suzuki, S. Takao, S.V. Subramanian, H. Komatsu, H. Doi, and I. Kawachi, “Does low workplace social capital have detrimental effect on workers’ health?”, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 70, pp. 1367 – 1372, 2010.
N. Watanabe, “Critical perspectives on Putnam’s social capital theory [in Japanese]”, Shagakukenronshu, vol. 18, pp. 135 – 150, 2011.
J. Field, Social Capital, London: Routledge, 2003.
P. Graeff, “Social capital: The dark side”, in Handbook of Social Capital: The Troika of Sociology, Political Science and Economics, G. T. Svendsen & G. L. H. Svendsen, Eds, Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 2009, pp. 143 – 167.
Y. Inaba, “The dark side of social capital [in Japanese]”, in The Frontier of Social Capital, Y. Inaba, T. Omori, N. Kondo, K. Miyata, S. Yano, and R. Yoshino, Eds., Tokyo: Minerva Shobo, 2011, pp. 245 – 256.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Author’s profile
Dr. Yasuyuki Fukukawa received his Ph.D. in Literature from Waseda University (Japan). He is currently a faculty member with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Waseda University. His research interests include health psychology, gerontology, and evolutionary psychology, as well as applications in environmental science and stress-adaptation theory.
Wataru Onoguchi received his M. A. in Literature from Waseda University (Japan). He is currently a student in doctoral course of psychology at Waseda University. His research interests include health psychology and social psychology, as well as applications in environmental science.
Dr. Ryo Oda is an Associate Professor of graduate School of Engineering at Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan). He majored in biological sciences at the University of Tokyo, received a PhD in biological science from the university. His research interests include anthropology and social psychology, as well as applications in evolutionar y psychology.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Fukukawa, Y., Onoguchi, W. & Oda, R. Reciprocity as Social Capital and Self-Rated Health in Japanese Community-Dwelling Adults. GSTF J Psych 2, 5 (2015). https://doi.org/10.7603/s40790-015-0005-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7603/s40790-015-0005-z