In the United States, about four in ten adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder during the pandemic in January 2021, up from one in ten adults from January to June 2019 (Panchal et al., 2023). In addition to the threat of infection, altered daily routines, financial pressure from an economic recession, and social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to mental health problems (Lu and Lin, 2021). While extensive research has been conducted on the role of social capital in mitigating distress during natural disasters due to the buffering effect of social support (Adeola and Picou, 2014; Cruwys et al., 2023; Kaniasty et al., 2020; Park et al., 2021; Sasaki et al., 2019), its relevance in infectious disease outbreaks were rarely evaluated until the COVID-19 pandemic, except for a few studies on sexually transmitted diseases (Rodgers et al., 2019) and influenza pandemic (Chuang et al., 2015; Rönnerstrand, 2014). During the pandemic, several studies showed social capital to be negatively associated with the spread of COVID-19 (Makridis and Wu, 2020, 2021; Varshney and Socher, 2020), deaths and hospitalizations (Bai et al., 2020; Borgonovi et al., 2021), mental health outcomes such as anxiety and stress (Caballero-Domínguez et al., 2021; Fulkerson et al., 2022; Snel et al., 2022), and self-rated physical and mental health (Larnyo et al., 2024), though some found mixed results (Arachchi and Managi, 2021).

Social capital, in simplest terms, is the benefits one can access through direct or indirect social interactions. At the individual level, social capital refers to “resources accessed through social interactions” and at the community or population level, it is viewed as “a property of the whole community” (Kawachi and Berkman, 2014). While social capital can be understood at individual, group, and societal levels, scholars often rely on individual measures collected through surveys such as participation, support, sense of community, reciprocity, and efficacy (Gilbert et al., 2013).

Social epidemiologists underscore the significance of being integrated into a social network which may produce positive psychological states like a sense of purpose, belonging, security, and self-worth (Kawachi and Berkman, 2001; McKenzie et al., 2002). The cognitive and emotional aspects of sense of community make this type of social capital especially relevant for mental health outcomes (Carpiano and Hystad, 2011). Beyond promoting mental health, social capital has typically been considered to be a buffer to protect mental health in the face of adverse or challenging life events, especially in middle and older adulthood (Cramm and Nieboer, 2015).

In the beginning of the pandemic, scholars turned to social capital to understand how to implement response and recovery programs. Specifically, they found “virtual community building, fostering solidarity between high-risk and low-risk groups, and trust building between decision-makers, health care workers, and the public” to be helpful (Wong and Kohler, 2020). Several studies showed the significance of social capital in mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic (Laurence, 2025; Snel et al., 2022). Although the threat of infection was greater in communities with higher levels of interpersonal interactions at the beginning of the pandemic, the degree of compliance to social distancing was higher, leading to reduced mobility, lower level of community transmission, better self-sustenance, and improved health outcomes (Borgonovi and Andrieu, 2020). After the vaccines were developed and widely distributed in the spring of 2021, the emphasis on social distancing–which, in fact, referred to physical distancing–waned.

This study examined the relationship between social capital and mental health, before and after the widespread availability of vaccines. A set of longitudinal analyses evaluated the associations between sense of community at the neighborhood level and self-reported symptoms of depression and anxiety among community-dwelling adults in the State of Wisconsin over time.