Community cohesion alone protected Rosetans from heart attacks until they abandoned it
Evidence
Nowhere is the connection better illustrated than in Roseto, Pennsylvania. This small Italian American community has been the subject of nearly forty years of in-depth study, beginning in the 1950s when medical researchers noticed a happy but puzzling phenomenon. Compared with residents of neighboring towns, Rosetans just didn’t die of heart attacks. Their (age-adjusted) heart attack rate was less than half that of their neighbors; over a seven-year period not a single Roseto resident under forty-seven had died of a heart attack. The researchers looked for the usual explanations: diet, exercise, weight, smoking, genetic predisposition, and so forth. But none of these explanations held the answer—indeed, Rosetans were actually more likely to have some of these risk factors than were people in neighboring towns. The researchers then began to explore Roseto’s social dynamics. The town had been founded in the nineteenth century by people from the same southern Italian village. Through local leadership these immigrants had created a mutual aid society, churches, sports clubs, a labor union, a newspaper, Scout troops, and a park and athletic field. The residents had also developed a tight-knit community where conspicuous displays of wealth were scorned and family values and good behaviors reinforced. Rosetans learned to draw on one another for financial, emotional, and other forms of support. By day they congregated on front porches to watch the comings and goings, and by night they gravitated to local social clubs. In the 1960s the researchers began to suspect that social capital (though they didn’t use the term) was the key to Rosetans’ healthy hearts. And the researchers worried that as socially mobile young people began to reject the tight-knit Italian folkways, the heart attack rate would begin to rise. Sure enough, by the 1980s Roseto’s new generation of adults had a heart attack rate above that of their neighbors in a nearby and demographically similar town. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1152
Categorization
- XREF: The Roseto pattern of protective social norms dissolving as younger generations adopt mainstream mobility parallels the erosion arguments in Bowling Alone’s section II and echoes Durkheim on suicide rates rising when social fabric is disrupted. — connects to: A group’s protective shield fails when the setting redefines its members as outsiders
- QUESTION: Roseto’s egalitarian norm of scorning conspicuous wealth reads like a mid-twentieth-century counter-example to status-consumption theory — worth checking what sociologists made of it as evidence against simple income-based health models.