A longitudinal study on social capital and longevity of older adults:the application of network analysis

社会资本的概念在过去的二十年里变得流行，因为它可能有助于促进老年人的健康。社会资本假定了发展人际关系、信任和互惠规范的社区特征。为了了解社会资本与健康之间的动态关系，社会计量学领域发展起来的网络分析在公共卫生研究领域可能是有用的。本研究的目的是了解网络分析在公共卫生研究中应用的可行性和挑战性，并调查了社区内群体内和群体间卫生和卫生资源的人际交流和传染。我们在日本山梨县的一个农村城镇，对所有600人以上的老年居民进行了一次关于健康和社会关系的邮寄调查，那里仍然活跃着传统的金融自助团体活动，称为“mujin”。我们进一步收集了nforma 关于我们 使用滚雪球调查技术，调查参与者回答说他们参加了一个或多个mujin活动，对mujin会员的名称生成器的详细信息进行了调查。我们成功地捕获了镇上大部分的mujin组织。我们发现，以积极的态度积极参与mujin的人比不参与mujin的人不太可能发展为功能障碍，这与其他潜在的混杂因素无关。然而，那些参与互助小组的人，其主要目的是融资，与功能衰退的风险增加有关。通过这项研究，我们发现，网络分析数据可以收集和有用的公共卫生研究的设置，也确定了一些挑战。需要进一步的研究来了解在群体成员内部网络动态方面，mujin对健康的积极和消极影响的机制，这将在我们未来5年的研究项目中完成。少

The concept of social capital has become popular in the last two decades, as it may contribute to health promotion of older adults. Social capital posits the community characteristics that develops interpersonal ties, trusts, and the norm of reciprocity. To understand the dynamisms of the association between social capital and health, the network analysis developed in the field of sociometry may be useful in the field of public health research. The aim of this study was to understand the feasibility and challenges of the application of network analysis on public health research and investigated the interpersonal exchange and contagion of health and health resources within and between groups in a community. We conducted a mailed survey on health and social relationships for all older residents over 600 people in a rural town in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, where the traditional financial self-help group activity called “mujin” has still been actively operated. We further gathered nforma … More tion on detailed information of name generators for mujin memberships from the study participants who answered that they had participated in one of more mujin activities, using a snowball survey technique. We succeeded in capturing most of mujin groups in the town. We found that persons who participated in mujin actively with a positive attitude were less likely to develop functional disability than nonparticipants of mujin independent of other potential confounding factors. However, those who participated in mujin groups, whose primary purpose was financing,were linked to rather increased risks for functional decline. With this study we found that the network analytic data can be gathered and useful in the setting of public health research, and some challenges were also identified. Further studies would be needed to understand the mechanisms of those positive and negative impacts of mujin on health in terms of the network dynamics within group members, which will be done in our next5-year research projects. Less