Classroom Edition: Social Capital with Josh West

In this classroom edition of the Y Health Podcast, Josh West explores the powerful concept of social capital and its impact on health and community well-being. Drawing on ideas popularized by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, this episode explains how relationships, trust, and community engagement influence mental, social, and physical health outcomes. Listeners will learn the difference between bonding social capital—the close connections that help us get through life’s challenges—and bridging social capital, which connects us with diverse groups and opens new opportunities.

Through real-world examples and practical insights, this episode highlights how community involvement, civic engagement, and meaningful social connections can reduce stress, strengthen trust, and ultimately improve public health.

Recorded, Edited & Produced by Averee Bates, Christy Gonzalez, Harper Xinyu Zhang, Madison McArthur, Kailey Hopkins, and Tanya Gale

Transcript

 Hello, this is Cougar Hall, host of the Y Health Podcast. Today I'm excited to bring you a classroom edition. This format is designed to share one or more key concepts from a course offered here at Brigham Young University that we hope you find beneficial without the pressure of course assignments or tests.

So breathe easy, sit back, and enjoy. I want to talk today a little bit about social capital. Social capital has been a popular topic with the popular media over the last couple of years. In fact, even here on campus, we hosted a speaker to talk about social capital. There's a name that's often associated with social capital.

His name is Robert Putnam. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone, and the idea behind. Using bowling as an example of what we used to do together. When I was younger, my aunt and uncle played in a bowling league. So every Thursday night they'd get together with other people in the league and they'd go to their local bowling alley and they had shirts and they had their own bowling balls and everything, right?

And they would go and they'd get together and they would just bond with people at the bowling alley. And it isn't that. Bowling is the only activity that we used to do that we no longer do, but it's at least the example given in the book. And certainly if we were to think about it, there are lots of other activities that we no longer do together that we once did as communities.

Lots of the service organizations like Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club, lions Club. Even the PTA and other sorts of service related organizations are struggling more now to maintain that sense of community and participation than they once were. This whole concept is social capital, or at least these are examples of social capital and that the negative effects of, of a decline in social capital.

But social capital we think of as community bonding, bringing people together. And what we see through our research is the more we bring people together and build a sense of community and a sense of belonging and a sense of kinda shared interests, the more likely we are to have engagement at the individual level with the community, and the better off our health is.

And I think there are probably a lot of pathways where that happens. Mental health is better. We feel less social exclusion. We feel greater participation and greater ownership in our communities. And so we start to do things that people that care about a community do. You kind of monitor your neighbor's health and wellness and when there are things amiss, then you take action.

But if you're not engaged in your community, then you may feel less of an obligation, less of a desire to do that. And I think the opposite of that, or the result is then people say, well, this is none of my business. But in communities where people really care and they're together, everything is their business to some extent.

So this idea of social capital, right? Bringing people together, strengthening communities, community bonding has been shown repeatedly to have impacts on health outcomes. Let me give you just a couple of examples of social capital, and we do social capital surveys throughout the United States on a routine basis.

The Social Capital Benchmarking survey. I've pulled a couple of items just to give you an example of we conceptualize social capital. Some of the items or some of the ways in which we measure social capital really relate to engagement on things that are of importance to the entire community. So things like voting.

Volunteering, right? Volunteering on, participating in blood drives, volunteering on community projects. Again, voting, but they're even, you know, more simple measures just to see if people really are engaged in their community. Do you know the name of the mayor in the community where you live or the city where you live?

Do you know the names of the senators in your state? Do you know your neighbors? How well do you know your neighbors? I think these are the types of things that people that are engaged. In their community, they feel a sense of belonging, a sense of community, and sometimes we measure that with kind of geographical parameters and sometimes we measure it with with social parameters.

So for example, do you feel a sense of belonging and engagement in your city? We could also ask that same question about whether or not you feel a sense of belonging and community in the, for example, church that you attend. Levels of trust are another indicator and another measure of social capital. And what we've seen in, in recent decades is that level of trust is in decline.

So a community where there's a lot of cohesion, a lot of, you know, a lot of shared interest, a lot of. Similarities. Those are communities that have high levels of trust. What we see in communities where there's low levels of trust is that the kind of mechanism or the pathway by which that influences health is there's an increased sense of stress.

And that kind of chronic and persistent stress can certainly impact our bodily functions and ultimately impacts health. And we see increased rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, on account of living in communities with high levels of distrust. One of the other measures of social capital, and this is kind of a, might be a silly measure, but we look at how.

People use technology, how much they use technology. So for example, television or using a personal device is your primary form of entertainment and, and the number of hours in a day that you're watching television or that you're streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime. Well. The more you do that, the less likely you are to be engaging with people in your community.

You're less likely to be talking to your neighbors and, and as more and more of us have not just personal devices, but streaming services and multiple streaming services, and those are so captivating, well with each of those, you know, each of those. Activities that pull us in. Those are fewer and fewer points for us to engage with our local community, to build trust, to have shared interest, to be volunteering on community projects, to be aware of social events, of civic engagements, voting, and all of these types of things that we're concerned about in really connected communities.

Social capital, we sometimes think of along these two dimensions. We think of bridging social capital. Bridging social capital is the type of social capital, the type of connections that happen amongst individuals that are very diverse or very different, one from another. And then there's bonding, social capital and bonding.

Social capital is the type of social capital that happens amongst groups that are very similar. To one another. So an example of bridging social capital then would be bonds that are being built and strengthened, maybe across racial and ethnic groups that are, that are very diverse, one from another people that live in different socioeconomic conditions.

Bonding social capital. An example of that would be the type of relationships that are strengthened at family reunions, maybe in local religious congregations like your ward for example. You share a lot of similarities with people in your ward because you are to some extent, geographically, right, aligned, and so that probably generally similar Socioeconomic conditions generally.

Similar levels of education and so forth. And so both types of social capital are very important to health and, and we target them differently as we try to build social capital. But we sometimes say in the literature that bonding social capital is the type of social capital that we need to get by day to day, right?

When something bad happens to you, we call and commiserate with our friends and family members, and we feel a sense of strength. We feel supported, we feel loved. By contrast, bridging social capital is the type of social capital that we need to get ahead in in society, right? So these are making connections with people that are different from us, very diverse from us, that might be able to help us move up this social gradient, so to speak, to look for new work opportunities.

As you think about how social capital might play out day to day in someone's life. Imagine someone who has just lost their job. Bonding social capital would help that person to feel loved and supported at a local level, and this would be family members, maybe spouses, children, parents, neighbors, ward members, perhaps ministering brothers and sisters who can really put an an arm of love and support around them and hold 'em close and tell 'em that it's gonna be okay.

Bridging social capital in this case would be maybe a business owner or a, you know, a supervisor somewhere that is looking for someone with a skillset to this recently laid off person might have. And so bridging social capital would be to the extent that they're able to forge those relationships and essentially offer that person new opportunities.

So both are important. In the short term bonding social capital really helps us to, to get by. But bridging social capital, and that was a really simple example, but bridging social capital is, again, it's the type of social capital that we construct and that we strengthen, that we foster with, or groups or organizations that are, that are different from us that, that don't share maybe our day-to-day similarities and qualities.

So the way that social capital impacts health and health outcomes, again, to kind of revisit what I said previously, is that as our connections are strengthened in our local circles and organizations and then with the larger community, we feel supported, we feel more integrated with society. Our levels of stress and anxiety are go down.

We gain greater access and awareness of services that are available and opportunities we feel more comfortable accessing services, even healthcare services. We adopt more of the local practices and are more aware of social constructs that might be, you know, that might influence our health. We're more aware of social norms and subjective norms, and to the extent that those norms are healthy.

You know, one example might be, if you were to think of recent immigrant. Being placed into a community, they haven't yet acculturated. And so lots of their practices would reflect those that you would expect in their home country or where they came from. But say for example, people in the now host.

Community love to play pickleball. And so to the extent that an immigrant or a person that's new to that community begins to acculturate and feel integrated into the community, loved and supported, there'll be invitations to go play pickleball and things like that. So, I mean, this is a really simple example, but to kind of characterize how, as we.

Forge and build these relationships with members in our community, our social health, our mental health, and our physical health are all impacted. And as it turns out, these impacts have very marked impacts on our health outcomes. So as we think about. Bonding and bridging social capital and, and how we might build each of these in our communities so that we can improve health outcomes.

Some of the things that we really want to emphasize and focus on are, I mean, many of the things that we're encouraged to do already, but perhaps to do them just a little bit better and with eye towards those who might be marginalized, who might be on the outskirts or who might be less engaged. So even things like church attendance.

We get together weekly and sometimes more than weekly with members in our community, members in our congregation, and we come together to strengthen one another, to bear one another's burdens to help each other in ways that frankly, we're not able to do alone. And so we get together and we commiserate with one another.

We provide support, we provide love. So absolutely church attendance. Participating in church services frequently is absolutely a source of social capital. Community gatherings, events that are sponsored by community or community organizations. Bring people together now. We need to make a special effort to make sure that we're achieving both bonding and bridging social capital.

We wanna make sure that we're bringing together not just those that are like us, but people that might be different from us, that might be from different socioeconomic classes, people that might have different cultural practices, different religious practices. We want every opportunity as possible to rub shoulders with one another.

As we do that, and we become more aware of those who might. Be perceived to be different from us. It has this neutralizing effect, increases levels of trust, so decreases distrust, right? We bring people together and we recognize that although you may be a little bit different from me, you're actually someone that can be trusted.

Levels of distrust increase as our interactions and connections with them decrease. And so those that are different from us, there is this kind of natural tendency to distrust them because, well, they're not like me, but as we bring people together in community gatherings, we interact with one another and it kind of tears down some of these barriers and increases levels of trust and as levels of trust.

Increase, then it, it provides an opportunity for this kind of relaxation of stress and we need to be really careful in efforts to build social capital, bringing together communities to make sure that we have representation and participation from kind of all levels of society. We sometimes see in community events that those from the most marginalized community often participate and they'll often come.

Community events often have low cost. And you know, think about a park, for example, right? Parks can bring people together and a park is, to some extent, it's kind of funny to say it this way, but it's essentially a mini vacation for those that can't afford to go to Disneyland or Hawaii or any of these other places.

And so community spaces. Are places that the marginalized communities can't afford, and that's often where they recreate. And so we wanna make every effort possible to make sure that we're bringing in all dimensions of our community. So we wanna make sure that we're finding ways to get upper socioeconomic classes to also engage in community events or else it isn't really bridging social capital.

These are just bonding social capital events. So we want to pay special attention to make sure that we're planning and we're executing events that bring in. All aspects and all dimensions of of our community. Some of the efforts that I've seen related to this are in countries or places where we don't have a lot of parks.

Sometimes on a Sunday or on a Saturday, the city will shut down the roads for cars and they'll open it up as if it's like a, a makeshift. Park. And so a main arteries or main streets in the city will just be available for families of all walks of life to come, to walk to bike and to do so safely and, and sometimes there's vendors along the routes and kinda other festivities.

But the whole point is that we're trying to create a space for people to come together, to rub shoulders, to see one another, to interact. And we try to accomplish that with community events. And 24th of July celebrations and 4th of July celebrations and so forth, that, that have become really common and, and really, you know, have a lot of different activities, parades and, and fireworks.

And again, we wanna be very thoughtful and mindful that we're trying to pull in all kind of aspects and people from all walks of life. And then, you know, lastly, one thing to be aware of related to social capital is we're trying to build connections with our community. As we're trying to pull people together, we wanna be very mindful of those things that are pushing us apart.

And I think there are a couple of those that are. You're really prominent right now and, and one is politics. Politics can be very divisive and very polarizing. And so we wanna be very thoughtful that when we engage in political discussions, we do so very civilly with a growth mindset. I'm gonna listen to you and ask that you listen to me and I'm gonna be respectful and I'm not gonna attack your views and.

I'm okay moving some of my views and opinions as I listen to you and you make a good case, right? These are things that can push us apart. We don't need that right now. We need to engage in activities that bring us together, and I think the other is being thoughtful about our use of technology. Cell phones, smartphones, and I mean, really all the apps and all the, you know, social media and all these other things that are just so appealing and you have a few minutes and you're waiting in the foyer or the visiting room, and no one's visiting.

No one's reading a magazine. Everyone's on their phone. And, and I think we see this even at young ages, and we see this sometimes in church settings, in school settings, in, you know, even in sports settings that people are, are often on their phones and they're not talking, they're not connecting. So we wanna be really thoughtful and it isn't to suggest that social media doesn't have positive aspects.

'cause it certainly does and it isn't to suggest that phones can't be great for connecting. We can call people and, but it is to suggest that misuse of our devices and of social media can leave us feeling disconnected. And at a time like this, we want to connect. And so you wanna be very thoughtful about how often you're using social media and how often and where you're using your smartphones.

All with the goal that we're building, social capital, that we're coming together. That we're building and strengthening this community, cohesion that we're connecting with those with whom we share lots of similarities, family and friends and neighbors and ward members, but that we're also making intentional efforts, both individually and at the community level to connect with those that are very different from us.

And as we do this. We'll forge these bonds that will decrease levels of distrust, increase levels of trust. It will decrease levels of chronic and persistent stress, and this will have the effect of reducing rates of chronic diseases. It will improve our connectedness in the communities such that people will have greater access to services and to resources that will.

I hope you have service to them in their health journey. Thank you for supporting the Y Health Podcast. We look forward to continuing to provide you with engaging discussions as well as more focused educational content through our new classroom edition and our timely public health service announcements.

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