ABSTRACT
The World Bank sponsors a Web site devoted exclusively to the topic of social capital, where information is exchanged and issues actively debated. Similarly, in a recent book published by the Health Education Authority in Britain, the authors state, “There is a consensus in recent literature that the construct of ‘social capital’ may be usefully applied to the study of health and health-related behavior”. There are multiple indicators of social, collective, economic, and cultural resources across the levels of families, neighborhoods, and communities, but are they all markers of social capital? In social epidemiology, more specifically, social capital presents a model of the social determinants of health that excludes any analysis of structural inequalities (e.g., class, gender, or racial/ethnic relations) in favor of a horizontal view of social relations based on distributive inequalities in income. Social capital in public health is coined in terms of a lay/commonsense social psychology that has great appeal in the United States and elsewhere.
