TY - JOUR
T1 - Assessing urban-rural differences in the relationship between social capital and depression among Ghanaian and South African older adults
AU - Adjaye-Gbewonyo, Dzifa
AU - Rebok, George W.
AU - Gross, Alden L.
AU - Gallo, Joseph J.
AU - Underwood, Carol R.
N1 - Funding Information:
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31AG052288 (DA). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The Johns Hopkins Biostatistics Center and Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) also provided some assistance with software and statistical questions related to the analysis, and ICTR is sponsored by the National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) of the National Institutes of Health through Grant Number 1UL1TR001079. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Adjaye-Gbewonyo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2019/6
Y1 - 2019/6
N2 - Introduction Research has demonstrated benefits of social capital on depression, but variations in this relationship by geographic characteristics such as urbanicity have rarely been investigated. Methods Using survey data on 4,209 Ghanaian and 3,148 South African adults aged 50 and above from the World Health Organization (WHO) Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to extract dimensions of social capital from survey items. Structural equation models with the extracted factors were then used to estimate the associations between social capital and depression in each sample and assess differences between urban and rural settings with measurement and structural invariance tests. Results Factor analyses suggested three dimensions of social capital representing community engagement, sociability, and trust. Urbanicity did not substantially modify the effects of social capital on depression in either setting, but urban-rural differences in the measurement and level of social capital were observed. Urban Ghanaian older adults were less socially integrated and trusting than older rural residents (standardized mean difference: -0.28, -0.24, and -0.38 for community engagement, sociability, and trust, respectively) while urban South African older adults appeared less engaged in community activities but significantly more trusting and socially active informally than older rural residents (standardized mean difference: -0.33, 0.30, and 0.17 for community engagement, sociability, and trust, respectively). Moreover, while trust was associated with a lower risk of depression in South Africa overall, sociability and trust were associated with an increased risk of depression in Ghana. Conclusions Results indicate that the composition and average levels of social capital differ between urban and rural older adult residents in Ghana and South Africa although urban-rural differences in the strength of the association between social capital and depression were not substantial. Furthermore, the associations between social capital and depression are context-specific and are not uniformly beneficial.
AB - Introduction Research has demonstrated benefits of social capital on depression, but variations in this relationship by geographic characteristics such as urbanicity have rarely been investigated. Methods Using survey data on 4,209 Ghanaian and 3,148 South African adults aged 50 and above from the World Health Organization (WHO) Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to extract dimensions of social capital from survey items. Structural equation models with the extracted factors were then used to estimate the associations between social capital and depression in each sample and assess differences between urban and rural settings with measurement and structural invariance tests. Results Factor analyses suggested three dimensions of social capital representing community engagement, sociability, and trust. Urbanicity did not substantially modify the effects of social capital on depression in either setting, but urban-rural differences in the measurement and level of social capital were observed. Urban Ghanaian older adults were less socially integrated and trusting than older rural residents (standardized mean difference: -0.28, -0.24, and -0.38 for community engagement, sociability, and trust, respectively) while urban South African older adults appeared less engaged in community activities but significantly more trusting and socially active informally than older rural residents (standardized mean difference: -0.33, 0.30, and 0.17 for community engagement, sociability, and trust, respectively). Moreover, while trust was associated with a lower risk of depression in South Africa overall, sociability and trust were associated with an increased risk of depression in Ghana. Conclusions Results indicate that the composition and average levels of social capital differ between urban and rural older adult residents in Ghana and South Africa although urban-rural differences in the strength of the association between social capital and depression were not substantial. Furthermore, the associations between social capital and depression are context-specific and are not uniformly beneficial.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0218620
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0218620
M3 - Article
C2 - 31216344
AN - SCOPUS:85067477883
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 14
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 6
M1 - e0218620
ER -