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Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration

Social relationships are important predictors of a range of individual outcomes, such as wellbeing and health. These social relationships are conceptualised in different ways, such as (inter-personal) forms of social support, identification with groups, or social capital. What is the overlap among t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Richardson, Justin, Postmes, Tom, Stroebe, Katherine
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9009600/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35421128
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266499
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author Richardson, Justin
Postmes, Tom
Stroebe, Katherine
author_facet Richardson, Justin
Postmes, Tom
Stroebe, Katherine
author_sort Richardson, Justin
collection PubMed
description Social relationships are important predictors of a range of individual outcomes, such as wellbeing and health. These social relationships are conceptualised in different ways, such as (inter-personal) forms of social support, identification with groups, or social capital. What is the overlap among these concepts and in what ways do they differ? The present work aims to clarify this with empirical evidence from two panel studies (N = 3934; N = 2912). The studies include central measures of social relationships (group identification, group membership, social support and social capital). Empirical differences and overlap were studied by evaluating the factor structure of the data with both confirmatory factor analyses and bi-factor analyses. Results showed that the different concepts had a large amount of empirical overlap (together accounting for over 60% of common variance). Surprisingly, results also revealed that subcomponents were identifiable based on who they target and not based on their conceptualisation. For example, items about identification with neighbourhood factored together with support items from the neighbourhood, and not with other identification items. Accordingly, we conclude that in addition to a general factor, it is possible to meaningfully distinguish components of social relations based on which group is targeted by the items (e.g. neighbourhood or family and friends). For future research on the relationship between social relations and health, the present measures are unlikely to be sufficiently precise to disentangle whether health effects are caused by identification, support or capital. Differences between targets appear to be more important than differences between these concepts for understanding the relationship between social relations and health and wellbeing.
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spelling pubmed-90096002022-04-15 Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration Richardson, Justin Postmes, Tom Stroebe, Katherine PLoS One Research Article Social relationships are important predictors of a range of individual outcomes, such as wellbeing and health. These social relationships are conceptualised in different ways, such as (inter-personal) forms of social support, identification with groups, or social capital. What is the overlap among these concepts and in what ways do they differ? The present work aims to clarify this with empirical evidence from two panel studies (N = 3934; N = 2912). The studies include central measures of social relationships (group identification, group membership, social support and social capital). Empirical differences and overlap were studied by evaluating the factor structure of the data with both confirmatory factor analyses and bi-factor analyses. Results showed that the different concepts had a large amount of empirical overlap (together accounting for over 60% of common variance). Surprisingly, results also revealed that subcomponents were identifiable based on who they target and not based on their conceptualisation. For example, items about identification with neighbourhood factored together with support items from the neighbourhood, and not with other identification items. Accordingly, we conclude that in addition to a general factor, it is possible to meaningfully distinguish components of social relations based on which group is targeted by the items (e.g. neighbourhood or family and friends). For future research on the relationship between social relations and health, the present measures are unlikely to be sufficiently precise to disentangle whether health effects are caused by identification, support or capital. Differences between targets appear to be more important than differences between these concepts for understanding the relationship between social relations and health and wellbeing. Public Library of Science 2022-04-14 /pmc/articles/PMC9009600/ /pubmed/35421128 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266499 Text en © 2022 Richardson et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Richardson, Justin
Postmes, Tom
Stroebe, Katherine
Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title_full Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title_fullStr Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title_full_unstemmed Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title_short Social capital, identification and support: Scope for integration
title_sort social capital, identification and support: scope for integration
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9009600/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35421128
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266499
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