Johnston David W, Propper Carol, Shields Michael A
School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
J Health Econ. 2009 May;28(3):540-52. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2009.02.010. Epub 2009 Apr 5.
Economists rely heavily on self-reported measures of health to examine the relationship between income and health. We directly compare survey responses of a self-reported measure of health that is commonly used in nationally representative surveys with objective measures of the same health condition. We focus on hypertension. We find no evidence of an income/health gradient using self-reported hypertension but a sizeable gradient when using objectively measured hypertension. We also find that the probability of false negative reporting is significantly income graded. Our results suggest that using commonly available self-reported chronic health measures might underestimate true income-related inequalities in health.
经济学家在很大程度上依赖于自我报告的健康指标来研究收入与健康之间的关系。我们将全国代表性调查中常用的一种自我报告健康指标的调查回复与同一健康状况的客观指标进行了直接比较。我们聚焦于高血压。我们发现，使用自我报告的高血压数据时没有收入/健康梯度的证据，但使用客观测量的高血压数据时存在相当大的梯度。我们还发现，假阴性报告的概率与收入显著相关。我们的结果表明，使用常见的自我报告慢性健康指标可能会低估与收入相关的真实健康不平等。
