Measuring and monitoring general health status in elderly persons: practical and methodological issues in using the SF-36 Health Survey.

In the last eight years, there has been a notable increase in the number of gerontological studies that use traditional measures of functional status in tandem with generic health status measures. This article describes practical and methodological issues in using generic measures of health status with elderly persons. One of the generic instruments used to illustrate these issues is the SF-36 Health Survey. Selection of generic measures for use in gerontological research or cross-age life-course studies involves choosing the right horse for the right course, and multiple considerations must be weighed. Of equal importance to practical and psychometric considerations is the correspondence between the conceptual framework of the investigation and the conceptualization of health embodied in candidate measurement tools.