Is Social Capital a Useful Conceptual Tool for Exploring Community Level Influences on HIV/AIDS: An Exploratory Case Study from South Africa

This paper reports on an exploratory study investigating links between sexual health and social capital in a South African mining community. In this study, social capital is defined in terms of people's membership of voluntary community organizations (e.g. church, residents' associations, youth groups). Using biomedical and social survey data from a stratified random sample of 1,211 Carletonville residents, we tested the hypothesis that organizational members were less likely to have HIV.