Does It Really Matter Where You Live? A Panel Data Multilevel Analysis of Swedish Municipality Level Social Capital on Individual Health-Related Quality of Life
Author
Summary, in English
We test whether individual health status is related to area-level social capital measured by rates of voting participation in municipal political elections, controlling for personal characteristics, where health status is measured by mapping responses to interview survey questions into the generic health-related quality of life measure (HRQoL) the EQ-5D in order to derive the health state scores. The analysis is based on unbalanced panel data from Statistic Sweden's Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF survey) and a 3-level multilevel regression analysis, where level 1 consists of a total of 31,585 observations for 24,419 individuals at level 2 nested within 275 Swedish municipalities at level 3. We find that the health state scores increase significantly with municipality election rates. This result is robust to a number of measurement and specification issues explored in a sensitivity analysis. However, almost all variation in health status exists across individuals (more than 98%), which demonstrates that even if social capital (and other contextual variables) may be significant it is of less importance, at least at the municipality level in Sweden.
Department/s
Publishing year
2006
Language
English
Pages
209-235
Publication/Series
Health Economics, Policy and Law
Volume
1
Issue
3
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Topic
- Environmental Health and Occupational Health
Status
Published
Research group
- Social Epidemiology
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1744-134X