 Elderly people's ratings of the importance of health-related factors to their self-assessments of healthYael Benyamini, Elaine A. Leventhal and Howard Leventhal Social Science & Medicine, 2003, vol. 56, issue 8, 1661-1667 Abstract: Identifying the bases for self-assessed health (SAH) has interested researchers in their attempts to understand its validity as a predictor of future health outcomes. Quantitative approaches typically used statistical methods to identify correlates of SAH while qualitative approaches asked people to elaborate on the reasons underlying their rating of health. The current study used a quantitative methodology, asking 487 elderly people to rate the importance of 42 health-related factors as bases for their SAH judgment. Factors indicating overall functioning/vitality were rated highly by all participants. Factors indicating current disease were rated highly by people reporting poor/fair SAH while risk factors and positive indicators were rated highly by those reporting good, very good, or excellent health. Thus, there seems to be a clear distinction between poor and fair SAH that reflect levels of illness, and higher levels of SAH that reflect levels of health. Keywords: Subjective; health; Self-rated; health; Elderly (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:56:y:2003:i:8:p:1661-1667 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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