Social Capital and Health Outcome in Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

Quality of life is directly influenced by the quality of social relationships. Social Capital, a reflection of the cohesiveness of social networks, is considered a significant determinant of health outcomes. Social capital has been described as an empirically elusive concept, yet has also been heralded as the glue that holds communities together. While there has been much debate about its definition. Social capital can be understood as a network of social relations which are characterized by norms of trust and reciprocity and which lead to outcome of mutual benefits. Social capital stands for the ability of actors to secure benefits by virtue of membership in social networks or other social structures. Social capital as relationship in three dimensions that is bonding, bridging and linking social capital. Bonding social capital is a relationship that we have with people who are like us and typically refers to those among member of families and ethnic groups. Bridging social capital refers to those relationships we have with people who are from a different social –economic situation from a different generation or a different ethnicity. While linking social capital is a relationship people have with those in power. Linking social capital enables individuals and community groups to leverage resources, ideas and information from formal institutions beyond the immediate community radios. Thus, health status is critical to both human and economic productivity. Stemming from this, investments have been made to improve health. “On the one hand, millions of dollars are committed to alleviating ill-health through individual intervention. Meanwhile, we ignore what our everyday experience tells us, i.e. the way we organize our society, the extent to which we encourage interaction among the citizenry and the degree to which we trust and associate with each other in caring communities is probably the most important determinant of our health”. Using a set of household data generated from the administration of structured questionnaires to 520 respondents, only 479 were returned and found useful for analysis. This paper investigates the impact of social capital on health outcome in Niger State, Nigeria, using a multi-regression analysis method. The result obtained shows that social capital is positively related to health outcome in the Niger State, thus, fulfilling our a-priori expectations that the more social capital formation by both the people and the Government of the study area, the more they find themselves out of ill-health. The results notwithstanding, policy measures that would continue to make social capital relevant to improve health outcome were suggested.