The Influence Of Social Capital On The Health Of The Elderly Population

China’s population aging problem is becoming increasingly serious,and with the development of aging,aging has brought a series of problems to the society,such as the support of the elderly,daily life security and so on.How to realize healthy aging has become an important topic in many countries.In the existing studies on the health of the elderly population,more scholars believe that the social factors of health are more important than other factors such as biological and psychological aspects.Social capital is an important part of the social factors affecting the health of the elderly population,and social capital can be intervened by certain means,so the impact of social capital on the health of the elderly population has great research significance,and can provide a better intervention reference for promoting the health of the elderly population.However,since the development of social capital theory,no consensus has been reached on the definition of its content.Moreover,in the study of social capital’s effect on the health of the elderly population,due to the existence of endogenous problems,how to control the direction of the effect in the study to avoid the error of the results remains to be further discussed.Therefore,in the study of social capital on the health of the elderly population,we need to clarify the research dimension and choose the appropriate research causality test method,which is the source of the research questions of this paper.This study used data from the “Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS)”,takes social support,social participation and social trust as the core variables of social capital measurement.The measurement indicators of the health of the elderly population mainly include physical and psychological parts.In order to obtain the variables easily,the study adopts the variable of self-assessment of health to evaluate the health of the elderly population as a whole.In addition,depression indicators and anxiety indicators are used to measure mental health.This study focuses on the impact of social capital on health in three dimensions of social trust,social support and social participation,and explores in detail the gender and urban and rural differences in the impact of social trust and social support on the health of the elderly population,as well as the interactive relationship between online social participation and real social participation in different contexts.The relationship between social capital and the health of the elderly population is analyzed by general regression,and the impact of different types of social capital on the health of the elderly population is analyzed by causality test.In the part of the influence of social trust on the health of the elderly population,the fixed effect model was used to test the causal effect.In the two parts of the influence of social support and social participation on the health of the elderly population,the propensity value matching model was used to verify the causal effect test.Through empirical analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:First of all,as an important social capital content,social trust has a significant positive impact on the health of the elderly population.The self-health evaluation of rural elderly men shows a positive trend due to the improvement of social trust level,but in rural areas,the improvement of social trust level has a limited impact on the self-health evaluation of female elderly people.In urban areas,higher levels of social trust generally have a positive effect on the self-rated health of the older female population,but the effect on men is more limited.Secondly,the positive impact of social support on the health of the elderly population is weaker than that of social trust,showing positive effects only in some cases,while too much emphasis on social support may even show insignificant or negative health effects,showing the so-called "moderate effect".The reason is that older people need more social support only when their health is not ideal.In addition,there was a link between social support and anxiety in women.In urban areas,family social support helped reduce depression levels,but in rural areas,social support among friends did not seem to have a significant effect on depression levels.Third,the effect of online virtual social participation on the health of the elderly population is not significant.Only slightly reduced levels of anxiety and depression.However,online social participation showed a more significant health effect when it interacted with real social participation: this was seen in people with lower real social participation.However,online social participation was associated with higher levels of depression in older adults who were less engaged in real life.It should be noted that the positive health effects of online social participation are significantly lower than those of real social participation.Fourth,comparing the estimation results of the general regression model and the estimation results of the causal inference model reveals that the general estimation method that ignores the endogenous problem usually overestimates the causal link between social capital and the health of the elderly population,leading to more incorrect positive estimation results.This is because older individuals with positive traits tend to accumulate more social capital,and these older populations are more likely to enjoy better health,and the endogenous confounding caused by this positive selection will amplify the link between social capital and health of the older population.According to the above conclusions,the paper puts forward specific suggestions from three aspects: the development and utilization of social capital for urban elderly population,the availability of social capital for rural elderly population and the accessibility of social capital for special elderly groups.To improve the development and utilization of social capital of the urban elderly population includes improving their social participation rate,strengthening the social support system for the elderly,and improving social interpersonal trust.Promoting the availability of social capital for the rural elderly population includes suggestions on promoting the development of rural social capital to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and promoting the participation of the rural elderly population in social activities.The article focuses on special groups mainly for elderly people living alone and disabled elderly people.