A study on the longitudinal reciprocal relationship between social capital and depression in the Korean elderly: application of an autoregressive cross-lagged model

Recently, there has been growing concern regarding social capital, one of the social factors predicting depression in the elderly. However, previous studies related to the relationship between social capital and depression have focused only on one-way causal relationships, making it difficult to identify cause and effect variables clearly, and there have been insufficient studies validating the mutual causal relationship between the two types of variables. Therefore, this study analyzed the mutual causal relationship between social capital and depression in the elderly using an autoregressive cross-lagged model. We analyzed data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study (KoWePS), including 1,907 people (698 males and 1,209 females) aged 65 or over. As a result of the analysis, we found that social capital and depression in the elderly had a reciprocal causal relationship. In other words, a decrease in social capital in the elderly increased depression, while an increase in depression led to a decrease in social capital. Based on the results, we suggest several practical implications.