Mental health, interpersonal trust and subjective well-being in a high violence context

Abstract

This paper assesses whether two factors of wellbeing, social capital (interpersonal trust and social networks) and subjective well-being are associated with frequent mental distress and if there are any mediating effects by gender in a city of high urban violence. This paper relies on data that comes from a sample of over 1300 people representative by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic breakdown of the city of Cali in Colombia, which was collected in 2017 through face-to-face surveys. Our study uses logistic regression with fixed-effects at the district level to control for unobserved time-invariant factors. At the individual level, our analyses account for social and demographic context variables. The dependent variable is mental distress, defined as having 14 or more days feeling mentally ill in the previous 30-day period. Independent variables of interest are "interpersonal trust in unknown people" measured in a scale 0-10 and, social networks measured using the number of family members and close friends and subjective well-being through a question about life satisfaction in a scale 0-10. We find risk factors for mental health distress were low trust in unknown people, low life satisfaction, high levels of depression, living in cohabitation, being female, not having children, and living in middle socio-economic status. The odds of feeling mentally ill decreased as trust in unknown people increased by each unit in the trust scale (OR: 0.92). There were gender differences, with women's mental health being less likely to be affected by lack of interpersonal trust (OR: 0.94) than men (OR: 0.76). Our study suggests that actions aimed at fostering interpersonal trust in unknown people could positively affect mental health distress for both males and females. In the context of high urban violence, our study shows that men are more likely to benefit from such actions.

Keywords: Colombia; Interpersonal trust; Mental health; Subjective well being; Violence.