Gannon, B. and Roberts, J. orcid.org/0000-0003-2883-7251 (2020) Social capital: exploring the theory and empirical divide. Empirical Economics, 58 (3). pp. 899-919. ISSN 0377-7332
Abstract
Social capital is an expanding research theme in economics, but it remains a controversial concept and its use as an analytical tool has been questioned. The criticisms are exacerbated by a mismatch between theoretical coverage of the concept and empirical work. We demonstrate, using a large European survey of older people, that social capital is multi-dimensional, and explore the extent to which these latent dimensions coincide with its theoretical constructs. We use the association between social capital and health to demonstrate the importance of accounting for the multi-dimensionality in empirical work. We show that all the dimensions of social capital are associated with health, but while in general this association is positive, close household ties are inversely related to health and well-being. This potential ‘dark side’ of social capital has been largely neglected to date but is important if social capital is to be a useful analytical tool.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Social capital; Health; Older people |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 09 Aug 2018 08:50 |
Last Modified: | 25 Aug 2020 13:01 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s00181-018-1556-y |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:134380 |
Download
Filename: Gannon-Roberts2018_Article_SocialCapitalExploringTheTheor.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0