Social capital interventions in public health: moving towards why social capital matters for health

Social capital is defined as the resources—for example, the exchange of favours, the maintenance of group norms, the stocks of trust and the exercise of sanctions—available to members of social groups. A social group can take different forms, such as a workplace, a voluntary organisation, or a tightly knit residential community.1 2 Scholars have assumed that high stocks of social capital exert their effect on health outcomes in a multilevel fashion as it provides both individuals and communities with the resources to deal with adversities, which in turn is salutary for individual health outcomes.3–5 Therefore, scholars and policy makers need to consider social capital as a starting point to improve individual health outcomes. Although a multilevel social capital intervention can be problematic to design, costly and difficult to implement, it may involve greater success affecting the environment of a whole…

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