Social Capital: Convergences and Divergences Between Sociology and Public Health Resarch.

Public health strategies for disease prevention in the U.S. traditionally approach risk reduction through behavior change. An increasingly vocal collaboration of social scientists, public health researchers, policymakers and community activists who engage in challenging the notion of ?risk? to include social structure(s) that characterize individuals, groups, communities. The amalgam of these efforts is arguably embodied in use of the concept ?social capital?, a recent acquisition for public health researchers in the search for explanatory factors in rates of disease and other health-related risk behaviors across U.S. communities. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the sociological origins of social capital with its empirical applications in public health, thereby providing a meaningful guide for critiquing the concept as it proliferates in the research on disease prevention. These questions lead us to examine foremost, what exactly constitutes social capital, and secondarily, how do scholars validate these theoretical origins as well as measure its existence for practical use? Future questions remain to be explored, including our understanding of if, and how, social capital is a macro-micro bridge that accurately connects the meaning and influence of structure(s) and individual behavior into new strategies for disease prevention. Theoretical frameworks for HIV/AIDS prevention in the 21st century must be guided by the understanding of how social structure(s) produce HIV risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]