Social capital and Health:A longitudinal analysis from the Korean Welfare Panel Study

The aim of this study was to explore the extent to which social capital in socioeconomically vulnerable populations predicted self-rated health and mental health, and to demonstrate contextual explanations and hypothesized pathways linking social capital to health. We used data from the Korean Welfare Panel Study with the same individuals (n=5,935) providing responses from 2006 to 2009. This study investigated the association between changes in health over time and individual level of social capital by four different items specific to general trust, social network, reciprocity and civic participations, measures of socioeconomic positions, social security benefits, social support and the confounders age and gender. Mental health indicator was annually assessed using the CES-D scale. Applying multilevel analyses, we estimated the cumulative effect between each social capital indicator and self-rated health and mental health after excluding individuals with any pre-existing disability and chronic disease at baseline. Low general trust appears to be an independent risk factor for physical and psychological health in Korea. Our results demonstrate that individual-level social capital variables matters for socioeconomically vulnerable people especially. Decrease in general trust could lead to an increasing trend of worse self-rated health and mental health after adjusting individual social security benefits and social support.