Social Science & Medicine
Volume 60, Issue 9 , May 2005, Pages 2059-2071

 Location, location, location: contextual and compositional health effects
of social capital in British Columbia, Canada

Gerry Veenstra

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of British
Columbia, 6303 N. W. Marine Dr., Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Z1

Available online 13 November 2004.

Abstract
After decades of epidemiological exploration into individual-level risk
factors for ill health, a recent surge of interest in the health effects of
socially patterned attributes of geographically defined ‘places’ has given
the structural side of the agency-structure debate new prominence in
population health research. Utilizing two original data sets, one
pertaining to features of communities in British Columbia, Canada and the
other to characteristics of individuals living in them, this article
distinguishes the health effects of socially patterned attributes of
communities, including the social capital of communities, from the health
effects of characteristics of residents that contribute to social capital,
e.g., trust and participation in voluntary associations. Results from
multilevel analysis demonstrated that, of three different individual-level
measures of health and well-being (and including measures of long-term
limiting illness and self-rated health), only a measure of depressive
symptoms had variability that could be reasonably attributed to the level
of the community. The social capital of communities in the form of the
availability of public spaces explained some of this variability, but in
the direction contrary to expectations. Overall, location (community of
residence) did little to explicate health inequalities in this context. The
strongest predictors of health in multivariate and multilevel models were
characteristics of individual survey respondents, namely, income, trust in
politicians and governments, and trust in other members of the community.
Breadth of participation in networks of voluntary association was not
significantly related to health in multivariate models.

Keywords: Place; Social capital; Multilevel modelling; Self-rated health;
Long-term limiting illness; Canada