Social Capital in the Health Development of Children

Abstract

Social capital addresses networks and ties, which deliver support, information and trust for the members of these networks. Being a member of such a network is your social capital, which in turn might improve your quality of life. This paper investigates the impact of social capital on the health and health behaviour of children in their growing up process. Therefore, the panel design employed includes 10 to 12-year-old school children, followed up for three annual waves. The data used is from the German survey of Health Behaviour and Injuries in School-Age–A Panel Study 2013–2020 (N ≈ 10.000 per wave). We took a longitudinal perspective to estimate the impact of changes in the social capital’s volume on health-related variables by relying on fixed effects models. Furthermore, we analysed whether the effect of social capital differs between certain socio-demographic groups, e. g. between children from high- and low-privileged households. The findings suggested a causal influence of social capital on their health and health behaviour. Intrapersonal changes in social capital significantly affected an individual’s health and health behaviour. Moreover, this effect was evenly distributed among all the socio-demographic groups, meaning that all children benefit from an increase in social capital in the same way. This suggested that for the health development of all children and adolescents, it is of foremost importance to build and stimulate social networks and resources (social capital) rather than concentrating solely on the financial aid.