Measurement tools of online social capital among adult population in health studies: a scoping review

Background There is an increasing interest in the impact of social capital (SC) on health of older people. However, the development of communication and information technologies (ICTs) made the tools used to measure offline SC ineffective. We aimed to provide an overview of theory-based comprehensive online SC measurements among the general adult population and compare their assessed aspects and psychometric properties. Methods We performed a PRISMA-ScR-compliant scoping review in Medline, Embase, Web of Science, ProQuest, and CINAHL databases and included studies published between January 2000 and September 2024 concerning the development or validation of the questionnaire methods assessing online SC. We included studies conducted in the adult population from any country focused on health or directed to general population. Reference to an explicit theory of SC was used to stratify the eligible studies into those analysed in the present analysis and those reported elsewhere. Results The search identified 13,072 records, of which 8042 unique records remained after duplicate removal and underwent title and abstract screening. Following full-text assessment of 425 articles, 86 studies met the inclusion criteria and 27 were analysed in the scoping review. Most of scales are adaptation of the measures for assessing SC as a whole. There is a lack of scales directed specifically to the older populations. A few tools are directed to general population, but none of them was validated in the health context. Conclusions The results indicate the need for development of the measurement tool to assess online SC which will be useful for population studies in public health and epidemiology, especially directed to older adults. The review protocol was registered at Open Science Framework on August 25, 2023 ( https://osf.io/t385d ).