Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, relationships between social capital and health have attracted great interdisciplinary interests. In this paper, the accumulated studies and criticisms of the vague concept of social capital and research methodologies are reviewed.
In response to the criticism, researchers have conducted many studies to provide scientific evidence. For instance, the theoretical studies of the concept of social capital, the empirical studies which focus on the sub-categories of social capital, the analyses that use more objective health variables such as mortality, the multilevel analyses that consider the ecological fallacy by using the individual and community level variables simultaneously, and the intervention studies which examine the possibility of effects of the operations of social capital have been conducted in many countries, including Japan.
Although, further studies are still needed to disclose the relationships of social capital and health, recent efforts are gradually revealing the mechanisms of how social capital influence health.
