Individual Social Capital and Health: Empirical Cross-National Evidence of the Role of Income Inequality in 30 Societies

Literature has emphasized the association of various dimensions of social networks with health. In parallel, research has highlighted the influence of social structures and socioeconomic inequality on health. Although several explanations were postulated on the mechanisms that link social networks with health, such mechanisms still need to be explored within and across societies. The embeddedness of this linkage in the broader social structures and the influence of national contexts need further examination. Abundant literature has investigated the role of social capital as network resources in relation to health, but limited comparative studies still exist. In this research, we focus on the meso-level hierarchical context in which individuals dwell in their daily lives, or, in other words, the resources accessed through who they know in the status hierarchy. The aim is twofold: first, we assess whether network diversity, extensivity, upper-reachability, and average reachability, as well as a global index of social capital, protect individual health. Secondly, we assess whether this protective effect varies across societies according to income inequality. Based on the data of the 2017 module of the International Social Survey Programme on Social Networks and Social Resources, which includes representative samples of 30 countries, we show that several network indices and relational resources are distinctly associated with self-rated health. We also show how economic inequalities moderate the association between individual social capital and health. We discuss institutional factors and cultural differences that may explain why the association of network measures varied across nations.