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    • Alternatively increased local participation in may reflect

    2018-11-02

    Alternatively, increased local participation in 2005 may reflect the mitomycin of ‘miniaturization of community’ proposed by Fukuyama (1999). To clarify, he postulates that individuals’ radii of trust have been slowly decreasing over the past few decades. A terror event such as that experienced in London, could temporarily mimic this process, i.e. immediately after the London attacks, individuals may lose the ability to trust strangers (generalised trust) yet still retain high levels of particularised trust (trust in known/local individuals or groups). Such a tighter ‘local’ focus of trust could readily translate to an increase in active local participation, as shown in our 2005 data. That the social participation variable specifically detailed ‘local’ activity (i.e. a defined narrow radius of participation), coupled with the decrease in generalised trust levels seen in 2005 adds weight to Fukuyama\'s (1999) theory. Patterns of association between changes from baseline (2003) values in GHQ-12 scores and our other covariates in 2005 and 2007 were as expected (e.g. SRH - (Tessler & Mechanic, 1978), marital status - (Umberson, 1992), and employment status (Paul & Moser, 2009)). That the negative effects of marital separation, being unemployed and poor SRH on worse psychological wellbeing seemed stronger in 2005 than in 2007 (when compared to their respective 2003 baseline measures) may be due to psychological health being further compounded by the recent terror attacks in 2005, with the negative effects of terrorism diminishing over time (Whalley & Brewin, 2007). That the effects of age (Hankin et al., 1998) and gender (Piccinelli & Wilkinson, 2000) on worse psychological wellbeing remained stable over the five-year timeframe of this study adds further credibility to our other results. That lower levels of education seem to protect against worse psychological wellbeing in this study may be an artefact, as some doubts have been raised regarding the validity of the GHQ-12 item when assessing lower educated individuals (Araya, Wynn & Lewis, 1992; Mari & Williams, 1986). However, compared to the well-known SES gradients seen with other health outcomes (such as SRH, cardiovascular disease and poor health behaviours), a less-defined health gradient is often seen with the outcome GHQ-12 and individuals’ level of education (Lindström, 2004; Lindström, Ali & Rosvall, 2012).
    Strengths and weaknesses A major strength of this panel study is that it is longitudinal, comparing the same individuals pre- and post-London terror attacks, with a high number of individual respondents (N=9156). That these panel data span the timeframe 2003-07 allowed us to investigate the terror attacks in London and draw inference from any immediate and longer-term changes in associations from pre-attack (2003 baseline) measures. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical research paper to investigate the buffering effects of social capital on psychological wellbeing against such a backdrop. The data were obtained via interview rather than relying on postal questionnaires, which contributed to the very high participation rate of around 95%, year on year (Taylor et al., 2010). Unfortunately, there is no ‘gold standard’ with which to validate our social capital proxies (generalised trust and social participation); however, they have been considered acceptable proxies for two decades (Islam, Merlo, Kawachi, Lindström & Gerdtham, 2006; Kawachi et al., 1999; Putnam, 2001). Our sensitivity tests (Table 3) further confirmed the robustness of dichotonous trust compared with the three original trust categories. To reduce the risk of potential confounding, we further included numerous well-known mental health determinants in our full model analyses. One major limitation is that the BHPS sample was originally selected to reflect the UK population as a whole, and as such avoided oversampling of smaller-sized communities. Although there are more complex GHQ instruments to measure psychological wellbeing, there seems little difference mitomycin in validity between these and the GHQ-12 item used in this study (Goldberg et al., 1997). The sensitivity analyses (Table 3) demonstrated the robustness of the GHQ-12 item when employing different cut-off values. Further, values obtained for GHQ-12 and SRH must be considered relative, i.e. responses given were dependent on respondents’ usual levels; as such, some self-report bias may have been introduced, though the validity of GHQ-12 and SRH are quite high (see Methods). By year 2003, only 55.3% of the original (1991) cohort members were able to answer the questions posed (Taylor et al., 2010). This would have introduced further selection bias into this study.