Neighborliness with Ethnic Groups in the United States: Modeling its News Antecedents and Health Outcomes

The current study builds and empirically tests a theoretical model in which news use influences health outcomes directly and indirectly, as mediated by neighborliness with specific ethnic groups. With telephone survey data from 2007, a well-fitting structural equation model indicates direct and indirect effects of news use measures on two health outcomes: health status and stress. Effects of newspaper news use were more favorable than those via television and online news, and effects of neighborliness with whites and with Asians were more favorable on health outcomes than effects of neighborliness with blacks and with Hispanics. A formidable body of mass communication research has studied how people's use of news can influence their levels of social capital measures, such as organization membership, neighborliness, interpersonal trust, and civic participation. In addition, literature in the area of public health has explored how people's levels of social capital can influence their health outcomes. Unaddressed by these two bodies of literature, however, are questions of how people's news consumption can influence their social capital with specific ethnic groups (e.g., with whites or with blacks) - and how such types of social capital can bear benefits to people in the context of health. Underscoring the importance of research in this area is the rapid ethnic diversification of the United States and the development of related social, economic, and health divides. From 1998 to 2040, significant increases are projected in Latino, Asian, and black proportions of the U.S. population.1 Such ethnic diversification is significant when considering economic and educational divides (with whites and Asians having higher levels than blacks and Hispanics)2 and health divides (with whites having generally better indicators than blacks and Hispanics).3 Explanations for such unfortunate disparities can be found in communication and social processes, including the effects of stereotype-laden news portrayals and public perceptions of ethnic groups4 on social capital5 - and the effects of social capital with similar and dissimilar others on health outcomes.6 In considering how communication and social capital work in concert in explaining health outcomes in the United States, the current study attends to two critical relationships - (1) between people's news use and their neighborliness with specific ethnic groups, and (2) between people's neighborliness with specific ethnic groups and their health outcomes. How news effects on social capital may vary according to respondent ethnicity7 is beyond the scope of the current study. Instead, this study builds - and empirically tests - a multistep model by which news use influences health outcomes directly and indirectly, as mediated by neighborliness with specific ethnic groups. Defining Social Capital Previous research has provided myriad, at times incompatible, definitions of social capital. Putnam defines social capital as "features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit."8 Whereas Putnam conceptualizes social capital as a social attribute of communities, other definitions consider social capital at the individual level, which is the approach taken by the current study. For instance, Coleman defines social capital by its function as "not a single entity but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of a social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of individuals who are within the structure."9 Problematically, Coleman's functional view may present a tautology in which social capital can be signified only by its effects.10 The current study views social capital differently, in a manner similar to Bourdieu and Lin. Bourdieu delineated social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. …