Substitute or complement? How social capital, age and socioeconomic status interacted to impact mortality in Japan's 3/11 tsunami

Abstract

Why are some communities documenting higher case loads of COVID-19 infections than others? Past studies have linked the resilience of communities against crisis to their social vulnerability and to the capacity of local governments to provide public goods and services like health care. Disaster studies, which frequently examine the effect of social ties and mobility, may help illuminate the current spread of COVID-19. We model the occurrence of new cases from February 17 to May 29 using 4841 prefecture-day observations, paired with daily tallies of aggregate Facebook user movement among neighborhoods. This preliminary study of Japanese prefectures nds that communities with strong bridging and linking social ties start out more susceptible to COVID-19 spread, but their rates quickly decrease over time compared to communities with stronger intra-group ties. These results imply that residents' participation in civil society and trust in o cials affect their adoption of new health behaviors like physical distancing, improving their capacity to respond and adapt to crisis. Though bridging and linking communities suffered more early on, they adapted better to new conditions, demonstrating greater resilience to the pandemic. We anticipate this study to be a starting point for broader studies of the effect of social ties and mobility on response to COVID-19 worldwide, verifying what kinds of social networks we should invest in to adapt to this pandemic.

Capturing Bonding, Bridging, and Linking Social Capital through Publicly Available Data

“…Residents in a community with a higher level of bonding, bridging, and linking ties would be better prepared for shocks, suffer fewer casualties, and be better able to tap into regional and national resources. Vulnerable, elderly residents in Tohoku, Japan, for example, with higher levels of bonding social capital suffered fewer deaths than similar residents in communities with lower levels of such connections (Ye & Aldrich, 2019). However, we are unsure if social capital levels would have any correlation with physical damage from a shock, so we leave that hypothesized relationship as unknown.…”

“…We generate our hypothesized relationships between SoCI and these disaster outcomes based on existing research which has tied higher levels of social capital to higher levels of disaster resilience (Aldrich, 2012(Aldrich, , 2019. We believe that greater levels of social capital would negatively correlate with fatalities and the frequency of disaster declarations.…”

Social Ties, Mobility, and COVID-19 spread in Japan

“…Disaster scholars nd that strong social capital -social ties that residents use for physical, nancial, and social support in times of crisis -are powerful interventions that boost community resilience (Aldrich & Meyer 2015). Scholars found this after the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, the 1995 Heat Wave in Chicago, the 2011 disaster in Japan, and after Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey in the US (Edgington 2010, Klinenberg 2002, Aldrich 2019, Ye and Aldrich 2019, Aldrich & Crook 2010, Collins et al 2017, Smiley et al 2018, Metaxa-Kakavouli et al 2018.…”

Effects of Reconstruction Planning on the Utility of Social Capital in Minamisanriku, Miyagi after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake

“…In this regard, social capital aids in the efficiency of information diffusion by encouraging supportive behavior and minimizing redundancy and as such leads to low transaction costs of acquiring information. Ye and Aldrich (2019) underscore the critical nature of collective action and social capital by investigating how social ties interact with vulnerability variables such as socioeconomic status and age. They note that while there is heavy investment into physical infrastructure to mitigate future shocks in Japan, the authors reinforce the growing call to adequately invest in social infrastructure, so communities can better collaborate and cooperate to manage adverse disaster impacts.…”