Lost in translation: a genealogy of the “social capital” concept in public health
- 1Centre for Health and Policy Studies, University of Calgary, Canada
- 2Centre de recherche du CHUM, Universite de Montreal, Canada
- 3Department of Sociology, University of Calgary
- 4School of Population Health, La Trobe University, Canada
- 5Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, Canada
- Correspondence to: Dr S Moore Centre de recherche du CHUM, Bureau 3-02, Montreal, QC, H2W 1V1, Canada; spencer.moore{at}umontreal.ca
- Accepted 28 January 2006
Abstract
Study objective: To examine the genealogy of the social capital concept in public health, with attention to the epistemological concerns and academic practices that shaped the way in which this concept was translated into public health.
Design: A citation-network path analysis of the public health literature on social capital was used to generate a genealogy of the social capital concept in public health. The analysis identifies the intellectual sources, influential texts, and developments in the conceptualisation of social capital in public health.
Participants: The population of 227 texts (articles, books, reports) was selected in two phases. Phase 1 texts were articles in the PubMed database with “social capital” in their title published before 2003 (n = 65). Phase 2 texts are those texts cited more than once by phase 1 articles (n = 165).
Main results: The analysis shows how the scholarship of Robert Putnam has been absorbed into public health research, how three seminal texts appearing in 1996 and 1997 helped shape the communitarian form that the social capital concept has assumed in public health, and how both were influenced by the epistemological context of social epidemiology at the time.
Conclusions: Originally viewed in public health research as an ecological level, psychosocial mechanism that might mediate the income inequality-health pathway, the dominance of the communitarian approach to social capital has given disproportionate attention to normative and associational properties of places. Network approaches to social capital were lost in this translation. Recovering them is key to a full translation and conceptualisation of social capital in public health.
Footnotes
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↵* The list of 227 texts included in the study is available upon request from the corresponding author.
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Funding: early work was supported through funding from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship (to SM) and senior scholarships (to AS and PH). The later work of SM was supported through funding from Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec and the Strategic Training Program in public and population health research of Québec (a CIHR-Québec Population Health Research Network partnership).
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Competing interests: none declared.
