Was misst Self-Rated Health?

Family Structure and Family Climate in Relation to Health and Socioeconomic Status for Older Adults: A Longitudinal Moderated Mediation Analysis

“…The former was measured using the US version Likert scale, so that higher values would equal worse health (1 = excellent, 5 = poor). While self-reported health tackles difficulties associated with the collection of comprehensive health data, it involves different assessments of the same status given diverse expectations, scales, or experiences [ 63 ]. To obtain a comprehensive measure of disease, we complemented it by adding the number of diagnosed chronic conditions.…”

Design, Development, and Validation of the Self-Perceived Health Scale (SPHS)

“…Lazarevic [10] describes four properties of SPH that justify its widespread use as a health indicator. Firstly, SPH is recognized as an integrative construct because respondents have the ability to converge different aspects when evaluating their own health, including manifest or known facts such as suffering from a chronic-degenerative disease, as well as more subjective aspects such as the development of specific symptoms that are independent of those evaluated in medical reviews or those related to a diagnosed illness.…”

“…So, by SPH being a concept focusing on the subjective and individual evaluation of health status, through which different types of sensations and perceptions can be integrated, provides a precise information about physiological processes that may not be highlighted in clinical evaluations, such as inflammatory response [2,10]. It primarily focuses on assessing the overall health status, without explicitly considering the consequences of that state on different relevant aspects of a person's life, such as their physical function or social role, which are related to well-being or health-related quality of life [11].…”

“…Although they are related, they identify different aspects of an individual's health status. While SPH primarily focuses on the subjective evaluation that an individual makes by integrating various types of sensory and cognitive information, ultimately leading to their conclusion of how healthy they perceive themselves to be [2,10,11], health-related quality of life describes the individual's perception of their position in life within a certain cultural context and under certain values, with respect to life goals and expectations, including social, cultural, and economic factors in its assessment. It also evaluates the impact of a person's health status on different domains of their life, highlighting their ability to perform various functions that are important to them from both subjective and objective perspectives.…”

“…Despite SPH is a widely used health indicator in epidemiological research, public health, and social medicine, which has been considered equivalent to an individual's latent health status [10], the attributions that a person makes to determine their health status are highly ambiguous [2]. Similarly, due to the inability to evaluate the psychometric properties of the measurement since it is assessed through a single question, it is unknown what respondents understand by self-perceived health when answering the question, whether all individuals understand the same thing, and if they consistently describe the same evaluation through their response.…”