Title:	Global Perspectives on Social Capital and Health
Authors:	Ichiro Kawachi Soshi Takao S.V. Subramanian
Keywords:	Social Capital
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Since the publication of the forerunner of the present book, “Social Capital and Health” edited by Kawachi, Subramanian and Kim (2008), studies of social capital have continued to expand in new directions, extending into new applications and the analysis of new problems and puzzles in population health. A cursory search of the PubMed database using the search term “Social Capital and Health” reveals that over 2,000 papers were published on the topic in 2011 alone. As we argued in the earlier book, the concept of social capital holds broad appeal in terms of its potential for explaining diverse phenomena in public health. At the same time, the popularity of the idea has resulted in “conceptual stretch” and theoretical slippage to the point (sometimes) of losing utility as a meaningful construct. What is “social capital” and how is it relevant to population health? As a prelude to answering that question, we think it is useful to highlight three puzzles which help to illustrate how the concept is being applied in current research: 1. Disaster preparedness and recovery. The incidence of major disasters seems to be increasing worldwide, partly because of the rising settlement of populations in disaster-prone areas and partly because of factors such as climate change. During the past decade, major disasters—including the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, Hurricane Katrina (in 2005), and the 2010 Haiti earthquake—have extracted a devastating toll in terms of human casualties and the destruction of communities. From a disaster preparedness/recovery perspective, a major puzzle is to understand why some communities turn out to be much more resilient than others in the aftermath of major disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Residents of resilient communities are quicker to get back on their feet, more effective in organizing relief efforts, and more successful in overcoming collective action problems that hinder recovery efforts than in other communities (Aldrich, 2012). The rate of recovery following disasters depends on several factors—including, most obviously, the magnitude of the disaster (e.g., the size of the earthquake on the Richter scale and proximity to residential settlements). Nonetheless, even after taking account of these well-established factors, there remains substantial variability in the rate at which different communities recover
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51375
ISBN:	978-1-4614-7464-7
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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