The Empirical Relationship between
Community Social Capital and the Demand for Cigarettes

Authors

Timothy T. Brown, PhD
Richard Scheffler, PhD
Sukyong Seo, MPH
Mary Reed, MPH

Abstract

Rationale: Community social capital has been theorized to positively affect individual health behaviors through its positive effects on information flows and societal health norms. Smoking behavior is potentially one of these health behaviors.

Objectives: The objective of this paper is to estimate the association of community social capital with the demand for cigarettes. This association should be strongest in areas where there is a larger concentration of groups with strong non-smoking norms, such as religious groups.

Methodology: We estimate a two-part demand function focusing on the association of community-level social capital (CSC) and cigarette smoking. We use a new validated measure of community-level social capital, the Petris Social Capital Index, which is based on an actual ecological measure of CSC rather than on an aggregation of individual survey responses. We measure CSC at the level of the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) in order to capture the effects of CSC in both the areas of an individual's residence and employment. We link our measure of CSC to individual-level data on 38,807 adults in 48 MSAs with a population of 1 million or more for the years 1998-2000. We also split our measure of CSC into overall CSC and the percentage of CSC attributable to religious groups. We control for sex, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, education, cigarette prices, potential smuggling, income, nonsmoking regulations, and MSA-level fixed effects. Participation in smoking is estimated using a linear probability model and the number of cigarettes smoked is estimated using a negative binomial model.

Results: We find that the percentage of CSC attributable to religious groups is inversely related to the number of cigarettes demanded by smokers, but is not related to smoking participation.

Conclusions: Community social capital is a potentially powerful inhibiter of the smoking behavior of current smokers.

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