Abstract
Indicators of social capital—trust, reciprocity, participation—are associated with health outcomes; however, association does not imply causation. A systematic review of the literature featured in the first edition of the book Social Capital and Health (Kim et al. Social Capital and Health, New York: Springer, 139–190, 2008) concluded that the majority of studies published up to that point had been cross-sectional in design and failed to utilize methods to strengthen causal inference, such as fixed-effects analyses and instrumental variable (IV) estimation. The goals of this chapter are to (a) describe the threats to causal inference in observational studies of social capital and health, (b) highlight two analytical approaches—instrumental variables estimation and fixed-effects analyses—that strengthen causal inference, and (c) summarize the findings of empirical studies that have sought to address causal inference by going beyond simply correlating X with Y.
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Notes
- 1.
The cognitive dimension of social capital is tapped by values, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes—for example, perceptions of trust and reciprocity or sense of belonging to the community. By contrast, the structural dimension of social capital is tapped by behavioral manifestations such as civic participation, informal socializing, and the ability of the group to undertake collective action.
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Though no association was found between social capital and incident hypertension among women.
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3 Albeit the associations were imprecisely estimated—i.e., marginally statistically significant.
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4 Or alternatively, whether a misanthropic individual might be harmed by being surrounded by trusting neighbors—see Subramanian, Kim, and Kawachi (2002).
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5 Or at least in locations that were orthogonal to the survey respondents’ health status. Of course, if the town officials selected location based on lobbying by health-conscious residents, the instrument would not work. But that was not the case.
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6 Stated another way, we cannot ever empirically disprove that there does not exist a direct connection between the instrument and the set of unobserved confounds or that there does not exist a set of unobserved variables that are common prior causes of both the instrument and the outcome of interest.
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8 The intervention was designed to develop leadership capacity in the community with the goal of strengthening community organization, as well as to encourage civic participation among village households.
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9 Interestingly, the intervention was associated in a positive direction with increased levels of trust, but the estimate was not statistically significant. The researchers speculated that “trust takes more time” to develop (p. 891).
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10 That is, by design, the MIDUS sample of twins was restricted to those who were reared together until at least the age of 14.
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Kawachi, I., Ichida, Y., Tampubolon, G., Fujiwara, T. (2013). Causal Inference in Social Capital Research. In: Kawachi, I., Takao, S., Subramanian, S. (eds) Global Perspectives on Social Capital and Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7464-7_4
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