Welcome to a higher seminar with the invited guest Jan Mewes. Jan is associate professor at the Department of Sociology in Lund and will give a talk with the title “When and why does social trust translate into social capital? Evidence from the relationship between social trust and self-rated health”. Authors: Jan Mewes, Christopher Swader and Giuseppe N. Giordano (all Lund University).
Title
When and why does social trust translate into social capital? Evidence from the relationship between social trust and self-rated health
Abstract
Previous research has shown that social trust, the belief that most people can be trusted, predicts better self-rated health in some countries but not in others. The reasons for this bifurcation are poorly understood. Arguing that social trust acts as a stress buffer in everyday-situations involving encounters with strangers, we hypothesize that social trust only predicts better health if it is ”out-group connoted”, i.e. extending beyond the narrow confines of family members, neighbors and friends and including strangers, too.
Earlier research shows, though, that the radius of trust, i.e. the circles of others that people are referring to when assessing whether ’most people’ can be trusted, differs substantially between countries. Exploiting those cultural differences in the in- and out-group connotation of social trust in a global and rich sample of survey data from the European and World Values Studies, our findings contribute to an understanding about the circumstances under which social trust translates from a mere individual characteristic into actual social capital at the community level.