Measuring and modeling the social and geographic context of trauma: a multilevel modeling approach.

Increasingly it is recognized that health and illness are products of individual level risk and protective factors, as well as forces operating at contextual levels. In this article, we present the motivation and rationale for understanding trauma within its context. We use the example of the concept of social capital to illustrate the relevance of the contextual approach for trauma research and outline a multilevel modeling approach to examining contextual influences on trauma outcomes.