Health Risky Behaviors and Social Capital: Four Approaches to the Issue of Causality
- Presenter:
Chair: Richard Scheffler; Discussant: Chris Seplaki Mon June 5, 2006 15:30-17:00 Room 313
Author: Sherman Folland (folland@oakland.edu), Department of Economics, Oakland University
Title: Health Risky Behaviors and Social Capital: Four Approaches to the Issue of Causality
Rationale: Social capital elements such as spouse, children or community are well known to be statistically associated with better health indicators. The thorny question, however, is whether these elements improve health or whether they are correlated with health for other, perhaps spurious, reasons. We need ideas and research to disentangle this issue.
Objectives: The objective of this paper is to describe and test four approaches to identifying whether the observed positive correlation of health with social capital indicators is causal.
Methodology: The four proposed tests are as follows: 1) instrument the community social capital indicator, following Putnam; 2) test the associations of community level social capital with individual smoking and excessive drinking behaviors; 3) apply the DeLeire/Levy data on risk valuing behaviors of married versus unmarried men and women with or without children to individual longitudinal data including the risky behaviors of smoking and excessive drinking; and 4) produce a natural experiment in which movers to other MSAs with different community social capital levels are compared to stayers regarding their smoking and drinking behavior. These tests are made possible through a unique database that combines the NLSY79 Geocode data with a large marketing database used by Putnam and combining these in turn with area health resource and MSA community characteristics data. The attempt is made throughout to spot potential endogeneities and address them as best possible, likewise to address and discuss the identification problems of social capital research described by Durlauf.
Results: Preliminary results show that the instrumental variables approach to the Putnam community social capital index produces similarly strong and positive associations with health behaviors as does the raw index. The Putnam community level social capital measures are associated with reduced smoking for older (30+ year olds) but not for younger ages. As of this writing, the DeLeire/Levy application and the natural experiment described above are still in process, the combined database for this, however, is completed.
Conclusions: In the spirit of Karl Popper, causality is never proved, we can only apply more and better challenges to the hypothesis. Of the tests I have completed both in this research and prior work, the hypothesis tends to survive reasonable tests. Given the importance that would probably be attached to the “discovery” that social capital is a substantial influence on one’s health, this research should probably conclude that the ‘social capital improves health’ hypothesis has earned the right to further study.
