Evidence suggests a need to rethink social capital and social capital interventions

Alan Shiell, Penelope Hawe and Shane Kavanagh

Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 257, issue C

Abstract: In the 21 years since social capital first appeared in the public health literature, the evidence base has grown enormously, now reaching 28 systematic reviews encompassing more than 850 individual studies. We summarise this evidence and explain why conclusions relating to both the relationship between social capital and health, and the effectiveness of interventions to promote population health remain elusive and contradictory. A critical factor is the inadequate way that context is treated in the research, and especially how context interacts with efforts to promote health in a dynamic fashion. Of all the different types of interventions one could employ to improve the health of the public, ‘social capital’ interventions are likely to be the most context specific and especially affected by the boundaries placed around the context. A way forward is offered that requires a combination of insights from systems thinking, community-based participatory research, and intervention and improvement sciences. This requires renewed focus on the specific components of social capital, an understanding of how context interacts dynamically with efforts to improve health, a greater role for practice in the design, implementation, adaptation and evaluation of interventions, and the support of researchers to develop better methods for recognising and classifying the knowledge generated by complex interventions.

Keywords: Social capital; Social context; Systems; Review; Practice; Improvement science; Boundary critique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361830488X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:257:y:2020:i:c:s027795361830488x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.09.006

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().