1. Social Capital and Healthy
Ageing in Indonesia
By
Junran Cao (UWA)
Anu Rammohan (UWA)
1
2. Relevance of Social Capital to
Health
• The ageing population
• What is social capital?
• Community participation
• Generalized trust
• How is social capital linked to elderly
health?
• Indonesia as a case study
2
3. Aim
• Identify the main social capital variables that
play a role in mitigating poor health
• Test the robustness of these social capital
variables across different health measures
3
4. Data
• From the Indonesian Family Life Survey East
conducted in 2012
• Restrict analyses to households with at least
one person aged 50 and above
• Sample size: 1226
• Dataset contains information on at the
individual, household and community level.
4
5. Measure of Health
• Self-assessed health status
• General health
• Health comparison to peers
• Expectation of future health
• Self-assessed mental health
• Chronic illness
• Katz index of Independence of Activities of
Daily Living (Katz ADLs)
5
6. Method
Our main equation of interest is:
ℎ𝑖𝑗𝑘
∗
= 𝒙𝒊𝒋𝒌
′
𝛽 + 𝒚𝒋𝒌
′
𝛾 + 𝒛 𝒌
′
𝜆 + 𝑢𝑖𝑗𝑘
• ℎ𝑖𝑗𝑘
∗
: latent health status of individual i in
household j and community k
• 𝒙𝒊𝒋𝒌: individual characteristics
• 𝒚𝒋𝒌
: household variables
• 𝒛 𝒌: community variables 6
7. Method
• Choice of ordered probit model
• In the case of the Katz ADLs,
ℎ𝑖𝑗𝑘 = 𝜂 ⟺ 𝜇 𝜂−1 < ℎ𝑖𝑗𝑘
∗
≤ 𝜇 𝜂
where, 𝜂 = Require assistance, Moderately
independent, Highly independent
& 𝜇’s are the threshold levels
7
10. Results – Katz ADLs
• Both measures of social capital are statistically
significant and positively correlated with the
probability of an individual being in the highly
independent category
Require
Assistance
Moderately
Independent
Highly
Independent
Generalised Trust
-0.10***
(0.03)
-0.06***
(0.02)
0.16***
(0.05)
Community
Participation
-0.05***
(0.01)
-0.03***
(0.01)
0.08***
(0.02)
10
11. Results – Katz ADLs
• Other influential explanatory variables:
• Number of medical workers
• Elderly health centres
• Employment status
• Education attainment
11
12. Results – Katz ADLs
(Robustness test: Male-Female)
• Reasons to believe that effect on health is
gender-specific
Require
Assistance
Moderately
Independent
Highly
Independent
Female
Generalised Trust -0.17*** (0.05) -0.0003 0.19*** (0.06)
Community
Participation
-0.07*** (0.02) -0.0001 0.08*** (0.03)
Male
Generalised Trust -0.01 (0.04) -0.01 (0.05) 0.01 (0.1)
Community
Participation
-0.04*** (0.01) -0.05*** (0.02) 0.09*** (0.03)12
13. Results – Katz ADLs
(Robustness test: Ages 60+)
• Increased importance of household size
• Effects of social capital consistent with
original Katz ADLs estimation
13
15. Results – Other Health Measures
• Self-assessed health status
• Self-assessed mental health
• Chronic illness
• The contrasting effects of social capital with
respect to different health measures
15
16. Conclusion
• Access to better social capital is associated
with a higher degree of physical mobility,
independence and mental well-being among
elderly individuals
• Limited effects on more serious illnesses
• The role of social capital is generally
overlooked by the individuals themselves
16
17. Appendix - Endogeneity
• Question of causality: social capital may be
endogenous in that those who report poor
health may correspondingly be unable to
participate in community activities.
• Resort to IV regression
• Choice of IV – frequency of
violence/conflicts in the community
17
18. Appendix - Endogeneity
• Test for the presence of endogeneity using:
– The Wald test for dichotomous dependent
variables (SAHS 1-4 & Katz binary).
– Wooldridge’s test score and regression-based
F-test for continuous dependent variable (Katz
continuous).
• Insufficient evidence in our sample to reject
the null hypothesis that there is no
endogeneity. 18
