On Social Capital and Health: The Moderating Role of Income Inequality in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Past cross-national research has shown that health status does not exclusively depend on biology-related variables, but also on social capital measures, such as interpersonal trust and social participation. However, this literature has not considered network support, an important pillar of social capital when it is understood as access to resources within members of a network. In this article, we add this variable to the analysis to verify if previous findings still hold. We use data for 30 countries from ISSP's 2017 Social Networks survey module and multilevel modeling to show that network support is a relevant predictor of self-rated health status cross-nationally, while social participation and interpersonal trust are robust to its addition. We also find that income inequality moderates the association of social capital and self-rated health, indicating that a disintegrated society negatively affects the health of individuals, more so in countries where income inequality is high.

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