Associations Between Neighborhood Social Capital, Health Literacy, and Self-Rated Health Among People With Chronic Illness

Abstract

Health literacy skills are important for health and self-management for people with chronic illness. Neighborhood social capital can provide resources, such as access to information and informal social control over unhealthy behavior. The benefit of these resources, and the access people have to these resources, might depend on levels of health literacy. We investigated whether neighborhood social capital is differentially related to the health of people with chronic illness according to health literacy skills. This study focused on health literacy skills in 4 domains related to the ability to access and understand health information and to the ability to perform self-management. We found a significant positive interaction between social capital and health literacy skills for accessing and understanding health information. This suggests that health literacy enhances people’s ability to gain access to and use neighborhood resources to benefit health. There was no interaction effect between social capital and health literacy skills in the other 2 domains. More research is needed to investigate how people with chronic illness can benefit from knowledge, support, and other social resources for health and self-management also whether they have limited health literacy skills.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all participating panel members with chronic diseases. We would like to thank Data Archiving and Networked Services for making possible the use of WoOn 2012. We would also like to thank Statistics Netherlands for granting permission to use their data. We do not have any conflict of interest to declare.

Funding

This study formed part of the research program National Panel of the Chronically Ill and Disabled, which is financed by The Netherlands Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sports and The Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.

Additional information

Funding

This study formed part of the research program National Panel of the Chronically Ill and Disabled, which is financed by The Netherlands Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sports and The Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.