Social capital and quality of life in adolescent apprentices in Brazil: an exploratory study
Carregando...
Data
2013
Título da Revista
ISSN da Revista
Título de Volume
Editor
Resumo
Background: Adolescents who rely on social aid
networks tend to be more socially competent
and enjoy higher levels of quality of life than
those who interact only with their own limited
groups of family and friends. In this light, the
present study aimed to measure social capital
and analyse its possible relation to adolescents’
quality of life. Methods: This is a cross-sectional
analytical study with 363 adolescents from the
Brazilian NGO. The instruments used included a
short Portuguese version of the Integrated
Questionnaire to Measure Social Capital (SC-QI)
from the World Bank and its abbreviated Portu-
guese version from the World Health Organi-
zation Quality of Life Bref (WHOQoL-Bref) used
to measure the quality of life. To measure social
capital, the present study chose to use a
segmentation analysis, along with the Two-Step
Cluster method, applying Euclidian distance and
the criteria of centroid aggregation. The Mann-
Whitney test was used to compare the scores of
WHOQoL-Bref domains among the clusters, at a
significance level of 5%. Results: The segmen-
tation analysis resulted in two clusters, with 160
(44.1%) adolescents classified as Low Social
Capital (LSC) and 178 (49%) classified as High
Social Capital (HSC). Participation in activities
for the good of the community (p < 0.001), opi-
nion regarding the differences between people
in the community (p = 0.002), and number of
community meetings (p < 0.001) constituted the
decisive variables for determining the sepa-
ration of the clusters. When quality of life among the newly formed clusters was compared, the
highest average score in the HSC cluster was
found in the Psychological Domain (75.4 ± 11.9),
whereas in the LSC cluster, the highest average
score was found in the Physical Domain (74.6 ±
12.6). Lower quality of life scores was found in
the environmental domain for both the LSC clu-
sters (51.3 ± 14.0) and the HSC clusters (54.7 ±
15.5). This difference proved to be statistically
significant (p = 0.009). Conclusions: The results
showed that adolescents with higher social ca-
pital also presented higher scores concerning
quality of life. For the studied population, a po-
sitive relation between the two concepts was ve-
rified.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Social capital, Adolescent, Quality of life
Citação
CAMPOS, Ana Cristina Viana; BORGES, Carolina Marques; LELES, Cláudio Rodrigues; LUCAS, Simone Dutra; FERREIRA, Efigênia F. Social capital and quality of life in adolescent apprentices in Brazil: an exploratory study. Health, Irvine, v. 5, n. 6, p. 973-980, 2013.