“Your Health at Present”: Are Patterns of Reporting Heterogeneity in Self-rated Health Gendered?

Ralitza Dobreva () and Dorrit Posel
Additional contact information
Ralitza Dobreva: University of KwaZulu-Natal

Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2023, vol. 18, issue 5, No 3, 2197-2226

Abstract: Abstract This study explores reporting heterogeneity in self-rated health in a developing country context, and it thereby contributes to a growing literature which evaluates whether purely subjective indicators of health provide reliable measures of health status that permit inter-personal comparisons. We focus on gender and investigate if reporting patterns on self-rated health vary systematically between women and men. Most studies assess the reliability of self-rated health indicators by incorporating gender as a control variable in the analysis. We extend this research by examining whether gender intersects with a range of social factors to affect health perceptions. We analyse national longitudinal data, using the random effects generalised ordered probit iterative estimation procedure, thereby controlling for unobserved characteristics that may compromise cross-sectional analysis. Overall, our study corroborates other findings on the reliability of subjective health indicators, even in the culturally and economically diverse context of South Africa. However, although reporting styles are largely consistent between women and men, we also identify several differences, which warrant further investigation in other contexts.

Keywords: Self-rated health; Reporting heterogeneity; Gender differences; Longitudinal data; Random effects generalised ordered probit; South Africa; I10; J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11482-023-10183-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ariqol:v:18:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s11482-023-10183-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11482

DOI: 10.1007/s11482-023-10183-y

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Research in Quality of Life is currently edited by Daniel Shek

More articles in Applied Research in Quality of Life from Springer, International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().