Promoting Health Intervention Strategies from Social and Behavioral Research (2000) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Paper Contribution I: Public Health and Safety in Context: Lessons from Community-Level Theory on Social Captial
Paper Contribution I: Public Health and Safety in Context: Lessons from Community-Level Theory on Social Captial
Pages 366-389
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 366... ...
As reviewed below, for example, child and adolescent outcomes correlated with the ecological concentration of poverty include infant mortality, low birthweight, child maltreatment, and adolescent violence, health risks for adults include depression, homicide victimization, cardiovascular disease, and allcause mortality. At the other end of the spectrum, communities with high socioeconomic status appear to promote the health of children and adults.
|
From page 367... ...
According to James Coleman, social capital is a resource stemming from the structure of social relationships, which in turn facilitates the achievement of specific goals (Coleman 1990:300~. Such resources, be they actual or potential, are often linked to durable social networks (Bourdieu 1986: 249~.
|
From page 368... ...
In particular, Chicago neighborhoods characterized by poverty, residential instability, and dilapidated housing were found to suffer disproportionately high rates of infant mortality, delinquency, crime, low birth weight, tuberculosis, physical abuse, and other factors detrimental to health (1969: 106~. In another seminal study, Faris and Dunham (1965, 1939)
|
From page 369... ...
Although Goldberger may have been "rowing against the epidemiologic current" with his focus on the social context of individual risk factors (Schwartz et al., 1999: 19) , his work was nonetheless widely influential and illustrative of a much broader tradition of epidemiological research on the ecological context of health that dates back to the early 19th Century.
|
From page 370... ...
The ecological concentration of homicide, low birth weight, infant mortality, and injury indicates that there may be geographic "hot spots" for a number of unhealthy outcomes. The range of child and adolescent outcomes correlated with multiple forms of concentrated disadvantage is quite wide, and includes infant mortality, low birth weight, teenage childbearing, low academic achievement and educational failure, child maltreatment, and delinquency (see Brooks-Gunn et al., 1997a,b)
|
From page 371... ...
The move to low-poverty neighborhoods also resulted in significant improvements in the general health status and mental health of household heads (Katz et al., 1999~. Because the experimental design was used to control individual-level risk factors, a reasonable inference from these studies is that an improvement in community socioeconomic environment leads to better health and behavioral outcomes.
|
From page 372... ...
have called for a new paradigm centered around an ecological metaphor that would emphasize the broader context of individual risk factors, both at the macro level, with more attention to social environments, and at the micro level of molecular biology (Schwartz et al., 1999~. Within sociology, Abbott (1997)
|
From page 373... ...
(So too did the early Chicago School, if less rigorously. The connection between social disorganization and social capital is this: Communities high in social capital are better able to realize common values and maintain the social controls that foster public safety.)
|
From page 374... ...
In particular, much evidence reveals that friendship ties and family social support networks promote individual health (see House et al., 1988, Berkman and Syme 1979~. And contrary to the popular belief that metropolitan life has led inexorably to the decline of personal ties, sociological research has shown that while urbanites may be exposed to more unconventionality and diversity, they retain a set of personal support networks just like their suburban and rural counterparts (see e.g., Fischer 1982~.
|
From page 375... ...
(1999) thus view social capital as referring to the resources or potential inherent in social networks, whereas collective efficacy is a taskspecific construct that refers to shared expectations and mutual engagement by residents in local social control.
|
From page 376... ...
: "People in this neighborhood generally don't get along with each other", "People in this neighborhood do not share the same values." Social cohesion and informal social control were strongly related across neighborhoods (r = .80) , and were combined into a summary measure of"collective efficacy." Collective efficacy was associated with lower rates of violence, controlling for concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, immigrant concentration, and a set of individual-level characteristics (e.g., age, sex, SES, race/ ethnicity, home ownership)
|
From page 377... ...
and perhaps even shared expectations yet still lack the institutional capacity to achieve social control (Hunter 1985, Woolcock 1998~. The institutional component of social capital is the resource stock of neighborhood organizations and their linkages with other organizations, both within and outside the community (Sampson l999b)
|
From page 378... ...
(1999) , then, we view social capital and collective efficacy not as some all-purpose elixir but as normatively situated and endogenous to specific structural contexts (fortes 1998~.6 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN NEIGHBORHOOD RESEARCH Consideration of neighborhoods and health should not be confined strictly to social capital, of course.
|
From page 379... ...
, the differential land use of neighborhoods is a key to comprehending the ecological distribution of situations and opportunities conducive to a wide range of potentially adverse behaviors. In particular, the ecological placements of bars, liquor stores, strip-mall shopping outlets, subway stops, and unsupervised play spaces play a direct role in the distribution of highrisk situations.
|
From page 380... ...
As noted earlier, for example, friendship ties and family social support networks have been found to promote individual health (Berkman and Syme 1979~. Nor are the relevant health environments limited to urban settings and areas of disadvantage.
|
From page 381... ...
Field-based experimental techniques, such as dropping stamped envelopes on the street and counting how many get returned, could also be used in communities to observe collective efficacy "in action." IMPLICATIONS AND DIRECTIONS Consideration of the collective properties of social environments promises a deeper understanding of the etiology of health outcomes and the development of community-based prevention strategies. Indeed, the health sciences can "capitalize on social capital" by thinking creatively about the implications of extant research for community-based prevention strategies.
|
From page 382... ...
, youth and education (e.g., high school graduation, literacy) , and community health (e.g., low birth weight, neighborliness)
|
From page 383... ...
argue that governmental community intervention helped to reduce the infant mortality rate in New York from 1966 to 1973. Hence there is reason to believe that connecting health initiatives for children with strategies for community social organization is promising (Sampson 1999a)
|
From page 384... ...
There is some encouraging news in this regard from the evaluation of community policing interventions designed to increase the involvement of local residents, especially in those communities that have called upon faith-based organizations to be partners in the co-creation of social order (Meares and Kahan 1998~. One of the major goals of community policing is for the police to act as a catalyst in sparking among residents a sense of local ownership over public space and greater activation of informal social control.
|
From page 385... ...
Neglecting the spatial dynamics of neighborhood social organization and the vertical connections (or lack thereof) that residents have to extracommunity resources obscures the structural backdrop to social capital (Sampson et al., 1999, Sampson 1999a)
|
From page 386... ...
1997. "Neighborhood Environments and Coronary Heart Disease: A Multilevel Analysis." American Journal of Epidemiology 146:48-63.
|
From page 387... ...
1975. "Sociological Theory and Social Control." American Journal of Sociology 81:82-108.
|
From page 388... ...
1997. "Neighborhood Risk Factors for Low Birthweight in Baltimore: A Multilevel Analysis." American Journal of Public Health 87: 1113-1118.
|
From page 389... ...
1999. "Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children." American Sociological Review 64:633-660.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.