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Social Capital and Health

A Decade of Progress and Beyond

  • Chapter
Social Capital and Health

Abstract

Pick any current issue of a journal such as Social Science & Medicine or the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health and one is bound to see a featured article about social capital and health. Search on Pubmed for “social capital and health”, and one sees over 27,500 articles listed (as of December 2006). Enter the same search term in Google, and you get over 9 million hits. Yet wind the clock back to circa 1996 and one would be hard pressed to find an article in the public health literature that even mentioned this concept. In other words, within a short span of a decade, social capital has entered the mainstream of public health discourse, where it is now the theme of professional conferences, as well as the topic of white papers put out by government health agencies worldwide. For sure social capital was talked about in fields outside public health prior to 1996 – in sociology (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1990), economics (Loury, 1992), and political science (Putnam, 1993) – but the explosion of interest in applying the concept to public health is a comparatively recent phenomenon (Figure 1.1).

An erratum to this chapter is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71311-3_14

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Ichiro Kawachi MD, PhD, S.V. Subramanian PhD & Daniel Kim MD, MPH, MSc

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  1. Ichiro Kawachi MD, PhD
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  2. S.V. Subramanian PhD
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  3. Daniel Kim MD, MPH, MSc
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Society, Human Development and Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Kresge Buliding, 7th Floor 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Ichiro Kawachi , S.V. Subramanian  & Daniel Kim ,  & 

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Kawachi, I., Subramanian, S., Kim, D. (2008). Social Capital and Health. In: Kawachi, I., Subramanian, S., Kim, D. (eds) Social Capital and Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71311-3_1

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