Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between dimensions of social capital and self-rated health among Latinos and Whites. Although research linking social capital and health has been growing, surprisingly few studies have focused their attention on the Latino population, the largest ethnic group in the U.S. This is an important area of research because, although social capital is said to be a public commodity, evidence suggests that members of a minority group have less access to social resources and therefore may not benefit as much as Whites. Second, examining correlates of health within the Latino population is important because although this population has lower mortality rates compared to Whites, they have higher rates of morbidity.

Method: The current study utilized the Community Benchmark Survey, a national sample of 1,839 White and 502 Latino respondents and performed a multiple group analysis through structural equation modeling. Utilizing a social resource approach, social capital is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct consisting of: social trust index, diversity of social network index, number of people you confide in, number of friends, number of adults living in household and number of unrelated adults treated as family. The analytic model controls for age, education, income, language, and marital status. The outcome measure, self-rated health, is considered a quality global evaluation of a person's health and is also considered a more influential predictor of mortality compared to other objective health measures.

Results: The analysis found that relative to Whites, Latinos reported lower levels of social capital. Multivariate results suggest that, age, education, income, and social trust significantly affect the self-perception of health for both groups. Age was negatively associated with health; but the effects were stronger for Latinos than Whites. Education, income, and social trust were positively associated with improving the perception of health for both groups. Yet, education was more influential in improving the perception of health for Whites, while income was more influential for Latinos. The social relationship variables were inversely related to perceptions of health among Latinos, whereas they were positively related for Whites.

Conclusions and Implications: First, the importance of social capital does not supercede the importance of human capital and actual capital. Therefore, social workers should work towards continuing to mobilize capital and human capital resources in hopes of improving the health status among Latinos. Second, since aging had a more significant negative effect on Latinos, the author calls for health professionals to closely monitor the negative effects of aging among the Latino elderly, given that this group is known to underutilize social and health services and are also less likely to have access to care. Lastly, a major difference between the two groups centered around the effects of an individual's network on health. Social relationships had a negative effect among Latino respondents, but were positive for Whites. This suggests that social relationships may operate differently for Latinos and Whites in terms of how they affect an individual's perception of health. Future research is necessary to further examine this paradox.