IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/hecopl/v1y2006i03p209-235_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does it really matter where you live? A panel data multilevel analysis of Swedish municipality-level social capital on individual health-related quality of life

Author

Listed:
  • Islam, M. Kamrul
  • Merlo, Juan
  • Kawachi, Ichiro
  • Lindström, Martin
  • Burström, Kristina
  • Gerdtham, Ulf-G.

Abstract

We test whether individual health status is related to area-level social capital measured by rates of voting participation in municipal political elections, controlling for personal characteristics, where health status is measured by mapping responses to interview survey questions into the generic health-related quality of life measure (HRQoL) the EQ-5D in order to derive the health state scores. The analysis is based on unbalanced panel data from Statistic Sweden's Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF survey) and a 3-level multilevel regression analysis, where level 1 consists of a total of 31,585 observations for 24,419 individuals at level 2 nested within 275 Swedish municipalities at level 3. We find that the health state scores increase significantly with municipality election rates. This result is robust to a number of measurement and specification issues explored in a sensitivity analysis. However, almost all variation in health status exists across individuals (more than 98%), which demonstrates that even if social capital (and other contextual variables) may be significant it is of less importance, at least at the municipality level in Sweden.

Suggested Citation

  • Islam, M. Kamrul & Merlo, Juan & Kawachi, Ichiro & Lindström, Martin & Burström, Kristina & Gerdtham, Ulf-G., 2006. "Does it really matter where you live? A panel data multilevel analysis of Swedish municipality-level social capital on individual health-related quality of life," Health Economics, Policy and Law, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(3), pages 209-235, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:hecopl:v:1:y:2006:i:03:p:209-235_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S174413310600301X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:hecopl:v:1:y:2006:i:03:p:209-235_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/hep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.