Powdthavee Nattavudh
Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Soc Sci Med. 2009 Jan;68(2):251-9. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.11.015. Epub 2008 Dec 6.
This paper proposes that an individual's self-assessed health (SAH) does not only suffer from systematic reporting bias and adaptation bias but is also biased owing to confounding health norm effects. Using 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2005, I show that, while there is a negative and statistically significant correlation between SAH and individuals' own health problem index, this negative effect reduces with the average number of health problems per (other) family member. The relative health bias is small, however, which implies that measures of SAH may not suffer seriously from systematic health norm bias. This is an important finding for researchers working with SAH data as it indicates that we do not have to worry too much about controlling for confounding influences from the health of other household members when estimating SAH regression equations.
本文提出，个人的自我评估健康状况（SAH）不仅存在系统性报告偏差和适应性偏差，还会因健康规范效应的混杂而产生偏差。利用涵盖1991 - 2005年期间的13波英国家庭调查数据，我发现，虽然SAH与个人自身的健康问题指数之间存在负相关且具有统计学意义，但这种负面影响会随着每个（其他）家庭成员的平均健康问题数量而降低。然而，相对健康偏差较小，这意味着SAH指标可能不会受到严重的系统性健康规范偏差的影响。这对于使用SAH数据的研究人员来说是一个重要发现，因为这表明在估计SAH回归方程时，我们不必过于担心控制来自其他家庭成员健康状况的混杂影响。
