社会资本视角下的城乡老年人健康分化

将社区层面的社会资本定义为一个社区的各种居民团体和协会的活跃程度,从该视角研究城乡老年居民在健康上的差异。通过多层模型,控制个人因素,分析社区社会资本与个人健康水平之间的关系,引入社会资本变量对比城乡居民健康水平差异的变化。结果表明,在控制了个人层面的社会经济地位和人口学变量以及社区层面的经济变量之后,社区社会资本与个人健康水平存在显著的正相关关系;而对于个人的身体功能状态,社区层面因素的影响则不明显,更多地是受到个人层面变量的作用。其次,在控制社会资本变量后,城乡老年居民在健康水平上的差异明显变小,说明社区社会资本在解释城市与乡村居民健康水平的差异中扮演了很重要的角色,城市居民的优势来自更高的组织和团体参与程度。研究也部分地证实了中国老年人群体健康不平等的社会原因,为人口健康差异形成的理论探讨提供了实例验证。

Health Disparity between Urban and Rural Old People from the Perspective of Social Capital

This paper investigates health disparities among the aged Chinese population.Community social capital perspective is adopted to examine the factors that affect the existing health disparity between urban and rural old people in China.Health status is measured by the indicators of self-rated health and functional status.The concept of social capital is defined as the civic participation in a community.Multilevel modeling is used as the analytical strategy and the social, economic, demographic factors of relevance are introduced into the models simultaneously.The results show a significant positive association between community social capital and self-rated health after controlling for individual characteristics and community socio-economic status.But the study finds no meaningful association between community contextual characteristics and functional status.The analysis also reveals that urban residents have greater advantage on self-rated health even after controlling individual SES;however this advantage become less distinct when community social capital variables are introduced.These findings indicate the existence of a contextual effect of social capital on health outcomes, which plays an important role in the urban/rural disparity.The advantage of the urban old people may come from a higher level of community organization and participation.The findings contribute to the existing debates on causes to health inequality among aged populations by providing evidence for the function of community social capital.