Applied Economics, Erasmus University, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Soc Sci Med. 2010 Dec;71(11):1981-8. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.09.003. Epub 2010 Sep 16.
Researchers can rely either on retrospectively reported or on prospectively measured health changes to identify and quantify recent changes in respondents' health status. The two methods typically do not provide the same answers. We compare the validity of prospective versus retrospective measures of health changes by investigating their predictive power for subsequent mortality. Data from a cohort study conducted in the Netherlands are used to compare the ability of changes in self-assessed health (SAH) - either reported retrospectively or measured prospectively in three waves (1991, 1993 and 1995) - to predict survival until 2004. We examine the relationship between health changes and mortality with a proportional hazard models controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity, with and without control for pre-existing chronic conditions and the onset of new chronic diseases. For a high proportion of reports (39.8%), prospectively measured health changes in SAH do not concur with retrospectively reported health changes. Our results show that both measures of health changes are predictive of mortality in the model controlling for levels of SAH and socioeconomic characteristics only. Controlling for SAH, prior presence of chronic conditions, the onset of new conditions and unobserved characteristics, we find that prospectively reported health changes still predict longevity, whereas retrospective changes do not. These results suggest that the collection of longitudinal information on health changes has advantages over the - easier and cheaper - option of retrospective collection of the same information.
研究人员可以依靠回顾性报告或前瞻性测量的健康变化来识别和量化受访者健康状况的近期变化。这两种方法通常不能提供相同的答案。我们通过调查它们对随后死亡率的预测能力来比较前瞻性和回顾性健康变化测量的有效性。我们使用荷兰进行的一项队列研究的数据来比较自我评估健康变化（SAH）的变化——无论是回顾性报告还是在三个时间点（1991 年、1993 年和 1995 年）前瞻性测量——对预测到 2004 年的生存能力的影响。我们使用比例风险模型检查健康变化与死亡率之间的关系，该模型控制了个体未观察到的异质性，以及是否控制了预先存在的慢性疾病和新的慢性疾病的发生。对于很大一部分报告（39.8%），前瞻性测量的 SAH 健康变化与回顾性报告的健康变化不一致。我们的结果表明，在仅控制 SAH 和社会经济特征的模型中，这两种健康变化测量都可以预测死亡率。在控制 SAH、先前存在的慢性疾病、新疾病的发生和未观察到的特征的情况下，我们发现前瞻性报告的健康变化仍然可以预测长寿，而回顾性变化则不能。这些结果表明，收集关于健康变化的纵向信息具有优于回顾性收集相同信息的优势，因为后者更容易且更便宜。
