Elsevier

Health & Place

Volume 17, Issue 2, March 2011, Pages 606-617
Health & Place

“Sense of community belonging” in health surveys: What social capital is it measuring?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.12.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Canadian national health surveys regularly ask respondents to rate their sense of belonging to their local community. Health studies commonly use this question as a social capital indicator, but what social capital domains community belonging is measuring remains unclear. Analyzing Canadian General Social Survey data, we evaluate the validity of this measure with respect to network-based social capital and health. Results indicate that sense of community belonging is associated positively with several network-based social capital measures. Neighborhood network-based social capital most substantially reduced associations between sense of community belonging and health measures, but results differed by urban and rural settings. These findings indicate the need for public health surveys to include specific measures of respondents' networks.

Introduction

The health implications of community social connections, although having long been a research focus (Leighton, 1959), has witnessed renewed interest over the past two decades. This resurgence can be credited in significant part to the concept of “social capital” as a popular focus within public and population health (Moore et al., 2005, Moore et al., 2006).

Social capital, the resources embedded within social networks, considers the actual or potential material, informational, and affective resources that individuals have access to via social networks and that may be used as a means to pursue individual or collective action (Bourdieu, 1986, Coleman, 1988; Portes, 1998). As noted by Moore et al. (2006), health research on social capital has not typically focused on these network-based elements, and has instead often relied upon attitudinal measures of perceived interpersonal trust and reciprocity to serve as proxy indicators of real-life social relationships and social capital. Nevertheless, an increasing number of health researchers have utilized this network approach, focusing on (a) general social capital, that is, social capital that either exists within individuals' social networks in general (e.g. Moore et al., 2009a, Moore et al., 2009ba,b) or that emanates via their membership in groups and organizations (e.g., Rose, 2000, Veenstra, 2005, Harpham, 2008)—and (b) geographically bounded social capital that exists within particular locations (e.g., neighborhoods or larger local geographic areas) (e.g. Bhattacharya, 2005, Boneham and Sixsmith, 2006, Carpiano, 2007, Carpiano, 2008, Friedman et al., 2007). Network-based approaches to social capital, which have a long theoretical and empirical tradition in the social sciences, are crucial in studying social determinants of health. From a “fundamental causes” theoretical perspective, which focuses on access to resources as a key mechanism for maintaining health, a network-based approach to social capital enables a more precise examination of people's differential access to resources that may promote or harm health, thereby, helping us to better understand how social structures and policies shape health inequalities (see Carpiano et al., 2008).

Coinciding with this renewed interest in community social ties, public health surveys in Canada have, since at least 2000 (Shields, 2008), included a single question that asks a respondent to describe the level of her/his “sense of belonging to her/his local community.” To date, a number of published studies using these nationally based survey data have reported that this single item is positively and significantly associated with a variety of health outcomes, including better general health (Ross, 2002, Wister and Wanless, 2007, Shields, 2008) and mental health (Shields, 2008, Romans et al., 2010), as well as increased odds of undertaking a change in a variety of health behaviors (Hystad and Carpiano, 2010). From the perspective of theory, these studies are motivated by prior health research on social relationships and social capital and their findings are consistent with other research that utilizes more specific measures of actual social network ties (House et al., 1988). Some authors have even explicitly stated that they are using this sense of community belonging item as either a measure of social capital (Wister and Wanless, 2007, Laporte et al., 2008) or community connectedness (Romans et al., 2010). But even though this single item has been used as a proxy for social capital and produces findings consistent with prior empirical studies, is sense of community belonging—as a concept and a measure—really the same thing as social capital? We are unaware of any prior work that has sought to evaluate this question.

From the standpoint of theory, sense of community belonging has some conceptual overlap with research on psychological sense of community—most notably McMillan and Chavis' (1986) well-cited conceptual framework (although a number of other theories and multi-item measurement tools exist) (Long and Perkins, 2003, Obst et al., 2002, Puddifoot, 1995, Townley and Kloos, 2009, Tartaglia, 2006, Peterson et al., 2008, Coffman and BeLue, 2009). Central to McMillan and Chavis' (1986, p. 9) framework are four key components of sense of community: membership (“feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness”), influence (“a sense of… making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members”), integration and fulfillment of needs (“the feeling that members' needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group”), and shared emotional connections (“the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences”) (see also Garcia et al., 1999). Based on this framework, two arguments can be made. First, one's sense of community belonging may most closely reflect the membership domain. Indeed, items similar in wording to the commonly used sense of community belonging item discussed so far in this paper have been included in scales of sense of community (see the review by Lochner et al., 1999). Second, there is potential conceptual overlap between sense of community and social capital given that the latter either encompasses each of these four framework components or, in terms of structural factors that shape personal thoughts and behaviors, helps one in the pursuit to acquire these elements. In fact, an extensively cited review of potential social capital measures published during a period when the current public health interest in social capital was nascent includes discussion of how psychological sense of community may conceptually be tapping some aspects of social capital (Lochner et al., 1999).

Given this conceptual overlap between sense of community belonging and network-based social capital, it remains unclear, from a measurement perspective, what this single, commonly used sense of local community belonging item could be capturing with respect to one's actual social capital. Is reporting a greater sense of community belonging indicative of having greater social capital and, if so, what type of social capital is being measured? With respect to prior health studies, is this sense of community belonging item capturing the health-promoting resources of an individual's general network social capital or geographically bounded social capital located in either one's own city/town or neighborhood? In terms of construct validity, it is important to delineate these issues in order to improve inferences from empirical findings using this item.

In an effort to better understand prior research and to inform future studies, we examine the relations among personal sense of local community belonging, specific network-based social capital measures, and health. Using a Canadian national survey with a thematic focus on social relationships, we empirically evaluate:

  • (a)

    If this commonly used sense of community belonging measure is a valid substitute for actual network-based social capital measures and, if so,

  • (b)

    what is the “community” for which one's belonging is associated with health?

To examine these issues, we utilize a variety of measures of actual social ties and test how the association between one's sense of community belonging and health status varies with respect to general (non-geographically bounded) social capital (i.e., position-based social capital and group membership) as well as geographically specific social capital (i.e., located within one's city/local community and neighborhood). To be sure, the aim of this study is not to dismiss or critique any prior work using the sense of community belonging measure, but to simply contribute insights regarding measurement issues that may add to the interpretation of prior findings as well as guide future research that may utilize this measure in analyses.

Section snippets

Data and sample

We analyze data from Cycle 22 (2008) of the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS). This dataset is ideal for this current study given that the 2008 GSS focused thematically on social networks. The 2008 GSS is a national cross-sectional survey that was conducted by Statistics Canada from February to November, 2008 using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (Statistics Canada, 2010). The target population of the GSS included all persons 15 years of age and older in all 10 provinces of Canada,

Associations between sense of community belonging and specific social capital measures

Table 3 presents the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for a series of ordinal regression models that assess the associations between sense of community belonging and each type of social capital, while controlling for sociodemographic and health-related covariates. The results indicate that, in general, social capital in a variety of forms is positively and significantly associated with increased sense of community belonging. Social network diversity and having 1–5 close

Discussion

The current study was designed to better understand “sense of community belonging,” a commonly used measure in health surveys that has been frequently used as an indicator of one's social capital. Specifically, we examined what aspects of social capital this single measure may be capturing and, to what degree its observed associations with health may be attributable to respondents' actual network-based social capital. Using recent, high quality national data collected by the Canadian federal

Acknowledgments

Richard Carpiano co-authored this manuscript while receiving funding from Investigator Awards from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Perry Hystad acknowledges funding from a Canadian Institute for Health Research Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Michael Smith Senior Research Trainee Award, and a Bridge Fellowship. The authors thank Jennifer E.V. Lloyd for her invaluable comments on an earlier draft

References (42)

  • P. Bourdieu

    The forms of social capital

  • R.M. Carpiano et al.

    A guide and glossary on post-positivist theory-building for population health

    Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health

    (2006)
  • R.M. Carpiano et al.

    Theory building on the high seas of population health: love Boat, Mutiny on the Bounty, or Poseidon Adventure?

    Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health

    (2006)
  • R.M. Carpiano et al.

    Social inequality and health: future directions for the fundamental cause explanation for class differences in health

  • D.L. Coffman et al.

    Disparities in sense of community: true race differences or differential item functioning?

    Journal of Community Psychology

    (2009)
  • J. Coleman

    Social capital in the creation of human capital

    American Journal of Sociology

    (1988)
  • B.H. Erickson

    The Distribution of gendered social capital in Canada. Creation and Returns of Social Capital: A New Research Program

    (2004)
  • I. Garcia et al.

    Community and sense of community: the case of an urban barrio in Caracas

    Journal of Community Psychology

    (1999)
  • M.S. Granovetter

    The strength of weak ties

    American Journal of Sociology

    (1973)
  • T. Harpham

    The measurement of community social capital through surveys

  • J.S. House et al.

    Social relationships and health

    Science

    (1988)
  • Cited by (124)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text