Social-capital-based mental health interventions for refugees: A systematic review.

With over 80 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, providing safe, healthy, and supportive places for refugees has become an imperative for national governments, aid organizations, and host communities. While much has been written about the needs of these displaced people, organizations and practitioners tend to focus on essential material needs, medical care, and food and water provisioning. Yet a growing body of evidence points to the potential role of social capital - the bonding, bridging, and linking social ties that connect us to one another - as a critical resource for these refugees. We have little data about social capital interventions at individual and community levels to assist with mental health for this vulnerable population, and even less methodical evidence about such interventions' impact. This systematic review analyzes nearly 400 articles to find patterns in the literature on how social-capital-based interventions can improve the mental health of refugees. Within the studies of interventions that met our filtering criteria, the reinforcement or creation of social capital, especially bridging and linking types, serves as a crucial resource to help this vulnerable group. Specifically, our review showed that community and multilevel social capital interventions are key to curbing mental health symptoms among refugees. Given this scanty evidence base among a group so vulnerable to mental health problems, this review serves as an explicit invitation for researchers to further examine social capital interventions among refugees.

Social capital interventions in public health: A systematic review.

Despite two decades of research on social capital and health, intervention studies remain scarce. We performed a systematic review on social capital interventions in public health and searched the Pubmed and PsychInfo databases. The majority of interventions we identified focused on individual level change (e.g. encouraging social participation), as opposed to community level change. We included 17 manuscripts in the systematic review. We categorized studies according to the role of social capital in the interventions (as the direct target of intervention, as a channel/mediator, or as a segmenting variable) as well as the levels of interventions (individual, community levels vs. multilevel ). We conclude that the majority of interventions sought to directly strengthen social capital to influence health outcomes. Our review reveals (i) a lack of studies that incorporate a multilevel perspective and (ii) an absence of consideration of specific groups that might selectively benefit from social capital interventions (segmentation). Future research is needed on both questions to provide a more nuanced picture of how social capital can be manipulated to affect health outcomes.