Individual Social Capital, Collective Social Capital And Mental Health,

Followed by economic development and social improvement, mental health became a serious problem day by day. In the past, domestic and foreign researchers pay great attention to it in medicine and psychology. Now, sociological and biological factors are more appreciated, some related models are built to give explanations. The social factors that would affect mental health are numerous. However, since social capital put forward in the middle of twenty century, it is an important conception for mental health research and received authorization all over the world. It has been approved that social capital could resolve daily difficulties, release pressure, and provide support for us, then, mental health would be promoted as obstacles cleared up.Domestic and foreign researchers in social capital have two prime visual angles, individual social capital and collective social capital. According to the double views, the literatures available give several explanations to the relation between social capital and mental health. The author concluded them into two mechanisms, "social network" mechanism and "community" mechanism. The first is the reason which individual social capital interferes with mental health; the second is collective social capital's direct influence to mental health. Whereas, neither of them explained the whole things between social capital and mental health, interaction effects is excluded. The author carry out an investigation in shanghai city, received 976 validated samples from 31 communities. Based on multilevel analysis, the author gained several conclusions as follows. First, social capital has two levels, individual level and collective level. The mechanism of "social network" and the mechanism of "community" present simultaneity. Second, two levels of social capital cannot produce interaction effects in our interpretative model. The author considered collective social capital is public and collective resource, it is independent to individual social capital in multilevel model. Third, individual social capital is incapable of interpret the differences between communities, however, collective social capital could. Then, pay attention to collective social capital is valuable in further research.At the end, the author discovered that constructive factors of social capital are the premier explanations to mental health, however Yip's research in rural china have different results. Then, social capital may be dependent on social environment, different social context may have different kinds of social capital and the effects of social capital may be different. Region distinction may be included in further research.