Social Capital in Association with Socioeconomic Variables in Iran
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Social Capital in Association with Socioeconomic Variables in Iran Saharnaz Nedjat • Reza Majdzadeh • Azita Kheiltash Ensiyeh Jamshidi • Shahryar Yazdani
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Accepted: 8 August 2012 / Published online: 24 August 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract The objective of this study was to determine the various dimensions of social capital in Tehran and its association with socioeconomic variables. Two thousand, four hundred and eighty-four persons participated in the study through multi-stage stratified sampling in Tehran. The study questions were extracted from the World Bank integrated questionnaire. While respondents obtained over 50 % of the attainable scores in the ‘trust’, ‘cooperation’, ‘social cohesion’, and ‘political action’ dimensions, they obtained only 18.9 % of the attainable scores in the ‘networks’ dimension. The respondents in age groups older than 45 had higher trust scores than respondents in the 18–25 age group. Men had higher ‘network’ and ‘social cohesion’ scores than women (p B 0.001). Respondents in the poorest wealth quintile had lower ‘networks’ and ‘social cohesion’ scores than the richest group and ‘political action’ scores higher than the richest group (p = 0.038). The lowest score in ‘Tehranians’ social capital was in the groups and networks dimension. Therefore designing effective interventions for such activities, particularly in women’s groups, is a priority. S. Nedjat (&) School of Public Health, Knowledge Utilization Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, #12, Nosrat St, 16 Azar St, Keshavarz Boulevard, 1417965173 Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected] R. Majdzadeh E. Jamshidi Center for Community Based Participatory Research, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected] E. Jamshidi e-mail: [email protected] A. Kheiltash Department of Community Medicine, Medical Faculty, Center for Community Based Participatory Research, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected] S. Yazdani Education Development Center, Tehran, Iran e-mail: [email protected]
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Keywords
S. Nedjat et al.
Social capital Social support Trust Social determinant of health Iran
1 Background Social capital is defined as the norms, relationships, and values that govern interactions among people and the institutions in which they are embedded (Grootaert 2001). In other words, social capital includes networks, communications, and unofficial agreements that shape the quantity and quality of cooperation in a community. The definition of social capital is different in different studies, and in many articles it has even been measured without defining it (Nieminen and Martelin 2008; Poortinga 2006a). However, according to the literature, ‘trust’ and ‘memberships of voluntary organizations’ are two main dimensions of social capital (Hjøllund and Svendsen 2000). We considered ‘trust’ as a cognitive dimension of social capital in this study (Iisakka et al. 2006; Fr
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