Results: Higher levels of networks, civic participation and cohesion were reported in rural areas. Education and income were consistently linked with social capital variables for both rural and urban participants, with those on higher incomes and with higher educational achievement having higher levels of social capital.However, there were also differences between the rural and urban groups in some of the other predictors of social capital variables. Mental health was better among rural participants, but there was no significant difference for physical health.Social capital was associated with good mental health for both urban and rural participants, but with physical health only for urban participants. Higher levels of social capital were significantly associated with better mental health for both urban and rural participants, but with better physical health only for urban participants.
Conclusions and implications:The study found that social capital and its relationship to health differed for participants in rural and urban areas, and that there were also differences between the areas in associations with socioeconomic variables.Policies aiming to strengthen social capital in order to promote health need to be designed for specific settings and particular communities within these. Despite this health picture, life in rural areas is often seen as being higher in social capital, as expressed through a greater sense of community and social involvement, than in urban areas.5 But there is relatively little comprehensive research comparing rural and urban areas on measures of social capital, and we do not know whether social capital has similar associations with health in rural areas as those reported in urban studies. This study uses data from a telephone survey to compare the patterns of social capital and their relationship with health for those living in rural and urban South Australia.
Social capital and healthSocial capital is a theoretically contested construct with considerable debate on the best ways of conceptualising it (see refs 6 and 7) for a summary of these debates 9 We conceptualise social capital as a means to consider how individuals may differ in their access to particular components of infrastructure (e.g. trust, social networks) which may then differentially provide individuals access to resources such as help and assistance. By considering these individual components in the one analysis it is possible to build up a picture of access to 'social capital', without losing the respective strengths and weaknesses by using an overall measure. We use Bourdieu's approach rather than that proposed by Robert Putnam reflecting the communitarian school of thought. Putnam 10 conceived of social capital as a community-level resource and defined it as "features of social organisation such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit" (p 67). This view sees social capital as a public good of communities and does not explicitly consider how particular sub-...
Crude comparisons between people with and without disabilities obscure how disadvantage is patterned according to impairment type and gender. The results emphasize the need to unpack how gender and disability intersect to shape socio-economic disadvantage.
We found strong evidence of healthier fruit and vegetable purchasing in households located in areas where the proportion of food stores that were healthy was greater. Policies aimed at improving the balance between healthy and unhealthy stores within areas may therefore be effective in promoting greater consumption of fruit and vegetables.
Evidence about the mental health consequences of unaffordable housing is limited. The authors investigated whether people whose housing costs were more than 30% of their household income experienced a deterioration in their mental health (using the Short Form 36 Mental Component Summary), over and above other forms of financial stress. They hypothesized that associations would be limited to lower income households as high housing costs would reduce their capacity to purchase other essential nonhousing needs (e.g., food). Using fixed-effects longitudinal regression, the authors analyzed 38,610 responses of 10,047 individuals aged 25-64 years who participated in the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (2001-2007). Respondents included those who remained in affordable housing over 2 consecutive waves (reference group) or had moved from affordable to unaffordable housing over 2 waves (comparison group). For individuals living in low-to-moderate income households, entering unaffordable housing was associated with a small decrease in their mental health score independent of changes in equivalized household income or having moved house (mean change = -1.19, 95% confidence interval: -1.97, -0.41). The authors did not find evidence to support an association for higher income households. They found that entering unaffordable housing is detrimental to the mental health of individuals residing in low-to-moderate income households.
Background: While previous research on fast food access and purchasing has not found evidence of an association, these studies have had methodological problems including aggregation error, lack of specificity between the exposures and outcomes, and lack of adjustment for potential confounding. In this paper we attempt to address these methodological problems using data from the Victorian Lifestyle and Neighbourhood Environments Study (VicLANES) -a cross-sectional multilevel study conducted within metropolitan Melbourne, Australia in 2003.
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