Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

Social capital may be thought of as an invisible source of shared value among members of a community. This capital does not exist within individuals, but is created by their shared trust and coordinated action. A wealth of current research on the subject of social capital is taking place in Europe, North America, and Australia. A variety of studies have been carried out in Scandinavia, for example, looking at the effects of social capital (or the effects of its lack) from a public health perspective, while a long list of British, North American, and Australian studies approach the questions using the methods of political science.¹⁵ The subject forms a fascinating interdisciplinary intersection in which researchers in medicine, sociology, and political science may meet.

Markku T. Hyyppä and Juhani Mäki compared health outcomes of two groups in the Finnish province of Ostrobothnia. They found that despite similarities in socioeconomic status, education, and use of health services, the Swedish-speaking minority showed superior outcomes in morbidity, disability, and mortality when compared to the Finnish-speaking majority. In other words, members of the Swedish-speaking minority, on average, live longer and suffer markedly less disease than do the Finnish-speaking majority. The researchers attribute this difference to the disparity in levels and quality of social capital between the two groups. The researchers find the major differences to be a superior level and quality of “associational activity, friendship networks, and religious involvement” among the Swedish-speakers in this sparsely populated province.¹⁶

Hyyppä and Mäki emphasize the value of what they term as “trustful friendship networks.” Trust is a key term and a controversial one among researchers in this field. A touchstone in current thinking about trust is Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995). Fukuyama asserts that trust is an essential background to political and economic institutions in a healthy society.