Promises and Pitfalls of Anchoring Vignettes in Health Survey Research

Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk (), Emese Verdes-Tennant, Mary McEniry and Márton Ispány

Demography, 2015, vol. 52, issue 5, 1703-1728

Abstract: Data harmonization is a topic of growing importance to demographers, who increasingly conduct domestic or international comparative research. Many self-reported survey items cannot be directly compared across demographic groups or countries because these groups differ in how they use subjective response categories. Anchoring vignettes, already appearing in numerous surveys worldwide, promise to overcome this problem. However, many anchoring vignettes have not been formally evaluated for adherence to the key measurement assumptions of vignette equivalence and response consistency. This article tests these assumptions in some of the most widely fielded anchoring vignettes in the world: the health vignettes in the World Health Organization (WHO) Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE) and World Health Survey (WHS) (representing 10 countries; n=52,388), as well as similar vignettes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) (n=4,528). Findings are encouraging regarding adherence to response consistency, but reveal substantial violations of vignette equivalence both cross-nationally and across socioeconomic groups. That is, members of different sociocultural groups appear to interpret vignettes as depicting fundamentally different levels of health. The evaluated anchoring vignettes do not fulfill their promise of providing interpersonally comparable measures of health. Recommendations for improving future implementations of vignettes are discussed. Copyright Population Association of America 2015

Keywords: Anchoring vignettes; Survey methods; Self-rated health; Comparative health research; Reporting heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-015-0422-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:demogr:v:52:y:2015:i:5:p:1703-1728

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-015-0422-1

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().