Global Perspectives on Social Capital and Health

Book excerpt: This book is a follow up to Social Capital and Health (2008), edited by Kawachi, Subramanian & Kim. Global Perspectives on Social Capital and Health provides a timely update on emerging topics in a fast-growing field, and features contributions from an outstanding international team of scholars, selected from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds including: social epidemiology, medical geography, social psychology, social welfare and gerontology, pediatrics, political science, economics, and medical sociology. The book is organized in three parts: Part 1. Emerging directions in social capital research. This section highlights novel directions in social capital research. These include: a) novel settings for conducting research on social capital (workplaces, schools), b) new approaches for causal inference in social capital (instrumental variable analysis, twin fixed effects designs); c) cutting-edge directions for social capital research, including studies of the origins of community social capital, the use of social network analysis to investigate social capital, and novel methods for investigating the link between social capital and crime. Part 2. Social capital and health policy. The three chapters in this section highlight implications of social capital for interventions and health policy. Part 3. Social capital and health in global perspective The four chapters in this section look at research on social capital and health from a global perspective. The authors summarize the empirical studies on social capital and health conducted in each country/region, or each population group; discuss how the concept of social capital “translates” across different cultures; and identify challenges and future directions for research.