Is social capital associated with health ? Evidence from a study on the elderly italians

In the last decades there had been undoubted improvements in medicine and living conditions, still the distribution of health within and between regions is facing an increasing unbalance and many researchers from different fields have tried to understand why some individuals are more exposed to disease and mortality than others. An increasing interest on social capital as a key determinant for health has recently developed. This paper analyzes the association between social capital and self-perceived health among older adults in Italy. We used a multilevel approach to take into account the hierarchical structure of the population: individuals are nested in families which are nested into regions. Multilevel logistic regressions are performed using data on the fourth wave of the Survey on Health and Retirement in Europe. Two components of social capital are considered, bonding and bridging, in order to understand if relations inside or outside an individual’s inner circle are associated differentially with his/her health. The results demonstrate that both bridging and bonding are associated with self-reported health status. Consequently, in Italy, social capital plays an important role in explaining the heterogeneity in health perception among individuals.