Does self-assessed health measure health?

Abstract

Despite concerns about reporting biases and interpretation, self-assessed health (SAH) remains the measure of health most used by researchers, in part reflecting its ease of collection and in part the observed correlation between SAH and objective measures of health. Using a unique Australian data set, which consists of survey data linked to administrative individual medical records, we present empirical evidence demonstrating that SAH indeed predicts future health, as measured by hospitalizations, out-of-hospital medical services and prescription drugs. Our large sample size allows very disaggregate analysis and we find that SAH predicts more serious, chronic illnesses better than less serious illnesses. Finally we compare the predictive power of SAH relative to administrative data and an extensive set of selfreported health measures, SAH does not add to the predictive power of future utilization when the administrative data is included and improves prediction only marginally when the extensive survey-based health measures are included. Clearly there is value in the more extensive survey and administrative health data as well as greater cost of collection. Running title: Does self-assessed health measure health?

Not feeling well … true or exaggerated? Self‐assessed health as a leading health indicator

“…We further find that lower SAH raises the probability of being in the recovery transition (as opposed to permanence into a healthy state) in a few cases. Last, we find that relatively poorer lagged SAH is significantly and positively related with the probability of contracting cancer, a finding that is consistent with those of Doiron et al (), who use administrative instead of self‐reported morbidity. Transition estimates are repeated in a robustness check for Waves 2 and 4 only, with findings not significantly different from those observed in Table (Table S4).…”

“…The idea of a nexus between self‐assessed health (SAH) and objective physical conditions is widely acknowledged in the medical sciences, where a series of empirical studies have consistently shown that SAH is a good predictor of mortality from various diseases in specific countries (Appels, Bosma, Grabauskas, Gostautas, & Sturmans, ; Benjamins, Hummer, Eberstein, & Nam, ; Idler & Angel, ; Idler & Kasl, ; McCallum, Shadbolt, & Wang, ). Other important contributions have found that SAH as a dependent variable is more closely related to some specific dimensions of health, such as vitality, body pain, and physical functioning (Au & Johnston, ), and is a good predictor of diseases even when compared to more objective measures using administrative data (Doiron, Fiebig, Johar, & Suziedelyte, ).…”

Parental health and children's cognitive and noncognitive development: New evidence from the longitudinal survey of Australian children

“…In this paper, we use all parental health measures available in our dataset. These measures while being subjective 7 are commonly used in empirical research using survey data because they are found to be a strong predictor of true physical or mental health (Contoyannis, Jones, & Rice, 2004;Doiron, Fiebig, Johar, & Suziedelyte, 2015;Kessler et al, 2010;Nielsen, 2016;Vaillant & Wolff, 2012). As already mentioned in Section 2, possibly due to data limitations, some studies in this literature also use parental health measures similar to ours (Alam, 2015;Bratti & Mendola, 2014;Frank & Meara, 2009;Mühlenweg et al, 2015).…”

A Social Systems Approach to Self‐assessed Health and Its Determinants in the Digital Era

“…(), Doiron et al . (), etc., and the imperative for a just, healthy and thrivable planet, as supported by Laszlo (, ), individuals, communities and societies—in their capacity as dynamic social systems—should discover and develop pertinent solutions to the VUCA challenges.…”

“…Throughout the years, a myriad of studies has been conducted on purpose to examine the influences of the individuals' social class and socio‐economic features on the way people assess their own health, many of them confirming that these factors drive to disparities in the levels of self‐perceived health (Busutil et al ., ). Within the framework of social sciences, especially economics, self‐assessed health stands for the most commonly used health criterion (Norström et al ., ; Doiron et al ., ). Despite the arisen dilemmas on the main criteria individuals take into account when judging their overall health condition, self‐assessed health has come forth as a relevant dimension when tackling social systems.…”