Chronic illness and informal social capital: Individual level mediators and country-level moderators

This study investigates whether there are differences in informal social capital between people with a chronic illness and healthy individuals. We also test to what extent this relationship is mediated by individual characteristics and moderated by country-level characteristics. In contrast to previous research, we use representative recent and high-quality data from the European Social Survey of 2012 as well as multilevel analysis. Our results demonstrate that chronically ill people have less informal social capital, all across Europe. Individual characteristics, including depression, subjective health, and perceived income, mediate this relationship almost fully. Welfare regimes and the amount of money countries spend on health care moderate the relationship between chronic illness and informal social capital.