Structural social capital and mental health: a panel study

ABSTRACT

The link between social relations and psychological wellbeing is well established in sociological and mental health studies. Since the beginning of the 2000s, this link has been garnering new attention and interest in economic and public health studies. Almost twenty years of empirical studies testing this relationship have established contrasting results for two main reasons. First, the majority of the studies are based on cross-sectional data, leaving out endogeneity and heterogeneity problems; second, mental health measurements are often discordant from each other. This study investigates the relationship between structural social capital and individual self-rated mental health using five waves of the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1995 (unbalanced panel N = 44,684). We take into account the heterogeneity and endogeneity issues and implement fixed effects and lag-dependent variable estimations. Moreover, we used different methodologies to measure mental health as a robustness check. Our findings show the existence of a negative relationship between being both a member of and active in an organization and worse mental health. In addition, being active within an organization in the previous year has a negative effect on worse mental health in the following year.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural social capital
• mental health
• OLS fixed effects
• lagged variables
• British Household Panel Survey

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C23
• D71
• I10
• I31
• Z1

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Providing an unequivocal definition of mental health is not easy. Mental health can be considered a state characterized by a lack of mental diseases, or, following the WHO (2004), as ‘a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community’. In this paper, we refer to the above WHO definition of mental health and use the locution ‘psychological health’ as a substitutefor mental health.

² In each bracket, the first term indicates being member; the second term represents being active.

³ We demean the variable age to avoid the effect of collinearity of introducing the variable and its square in a regression. As a consequence, all our regressions have a limited VIF (see Olvera Astivia and Kroc 2019).

⁴ Regional dummies have values of 1 if the interviewed individual is a resident in a region; it has a value of zero otherwise. In the BHPS, Great Britain is divided into 18 regions that are standard in the UK geographical classification distinguishing Metropolitan Counties and Inner and Outer London.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.