Social capital and perceived stress: The role of social context.

Background: The aim of this study is twofold: to investigate how much variance in individual perceived stress is attributed to household and area levels, respectively, and to examine the association between social capital at the individual, household, and area levels and perceived stress, while adjusting for various cofounders at the individual, household, and area levels.

Methods: This study used data from the 2010 Seoul Welfare Panel Study conducted by the Seoul Welfare Foundation. A total sample of 5881 individuals in 2820 households within 25 areas was used for multilevel analysis.

Results: The results showed that a relatively large proportion of variance in perceived stress was attributed to the household level (45.86%) in comparison with the area level (6.96%), which indicates that household or family context is more important in explaining variance in perceived stress than area. This study also found that some components of social capital were negatively associated with perceived stress, and the association between social capital and perceived stress varied depending on levels and types of social capital measures.

Limitations: This study is based on a cross-sectional design, and thus it is not clear about the temporal order between the relationship between social capital and perceived stress.

Conclusions: Overall, this study showed that research on social capital and mental health can be advanced by systematically investigating the role of household social capital, not just geographical social capital.