Health benefits of social capital: A multilevel analysis of the Asian barometer survey (2003)

The purpose of this study is to examine the social determinants of health based on the analysis of the Asian Barometer Survey (2003) which consists of cross-national representative populations in ten Asian countries. The study investigates how and to what extent social capital- measured in terms of general trust, political trust, and social network is associated with self-rated health, while controlling for a host of socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results from the multilevel analysis reveal that all three social capital indicators have a consistent and robust effect across different models at the individual level. At the contextual (country) level, however, only the social network variable reaches the conventional level of statistical significance. The current research serves to fill an empirical gap in the extant literature which mostly contains studies on European and North American cases.