Disease causing poverty: adapting the Onyx and Bullen social capital measurement tool for China

Disease-causing poverty is a serious problem in rural China, where social capital can mediate the disease-poverty relationship. However, there is no generally accepted reliable, robust and viable measure of social capital for China's unique socio-cultural context. This study adapts for China the widely used Onyx and Bullen social capital measurement scale and tests the validity and reliability of a modified Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale, the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale, for a disease-causing-poverty subpopulation in rural China.

We conducted the forward and backward translation procedure and cross-cultural adaptation process to derive the 34 item Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale. Next we collected through face-to face interviews a sample of disease-causing poverty population in rural Shandong province in China to test a 29 item modified Chinese Onyx-Bullen general scale for a health subpopulation. Most of the rural respondents had no formal work, so 5 work-related items in the Onyx-Bullen general scale were deleted in the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the structure, validity, internal consistency and reliability of the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale. SPSS21.0 software was used for data analysis.

A total of 467 people completed the scale. For the 29-item scale, a better simple structure was found when the number of factors was limited to 8. The absolute values of inter-factor correlations were in the range of 0.004 to 0.213 and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.834. All the eight factors explain a total of 59.51% of the variance. The total scale had a Cronbach's alpha = 0.868, in which seven of the eight factors had Cronbach's α greater than 0.5.

The Chinese health version of the Onyx-Bullen general social capital scale showed an adequate reliability and validity in a rural disease-causing poverty subpopulation in Shandong province, providing the first general, robust, consistent and reliable measure of social capital in China. The Chinese Onyx-Bullen general social capital scale provides a scale for testing social capital in China or for modification along the lines of the Chinese Onyx-Bullen health scale.