| Description: |
Men and women are social animals but each person's death is an individual event. This paper examines under what circumstances and to what extent social shocks encourage bad health while social confidence protects people against social shocks. Social confidence is defined as an individual believing he or she can control what happens to their life, even in the face of disruptive challenges to society that Durkheim postulated as encouraging suicide. Yet confidence is also an individual attribute, for it must be internalized. From the perspective of social psychology, interaction with others is critical, but from the perspective of accounting for health it is the individual's internalization of confidence that is most important. Data from the ninth New Russia Barometer survey is analyzed through multiple regression to measure the influence of social shocks and confidence on physical and emotional health, net of social structure, human capital and social capital influences.
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