“If You Were Me”: Proxy Respondents’ Biases in Population Health Surveys

Bérengère Davin-Casalena, Xavier Joutard () and Alain Paraponaris
Additional contact information
Xavier Joutard: Aix Marseille Univ., CNRS, LEST & OFCE, http://www.lest.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article906

No 1905, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: Proxy respondents are widely used in population health surveys to maximize response rates. When surveys target frail elderly, the measurement error is expected to be smaller than selection or participation biases. However, in the literature on elderly needs for care, proxy use is most often considered with a dummy variable in which endogeneity with subjects’ health status is rarely scrutinised in a robust way. Pitfalls of this choice extend beyond methodological issues. Indeed, the mismeasurement of needs for care with daily activities might lead to irrelevant social policies or to private initiatives that try to address those needs. This paper proposes a comprehensive and tractable strategy supported by various robustness checks to cope with the suspected endogeneity of proxy use to the unobserved health status of subjects in reports of needs for care with activities of daily living. Proxy respondents’ subjectivity is found to inflate the needs of the elderly who are replaced or assisted in answering the questionnaire and to deflate the probability of unmet or undermet needs.

Keywords: proxy respondent; measurement bias; endogeneity; selection; Copula; needs for care; ADLs; IADLs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 C35 C36 I12 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.amse-aixmarseille.fr/sites/default/fil ... /wp_2019_-_nr_05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: "If You Were Me": Proxy Respondents' Biases in Population Health Surveys (2019)
Working Paper: "If You Were Me": Proxy Respondents' Biases in Population Health Surveys (2019)
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:aim:wpaimx:1905

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France AMU-AMSE - 5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498 - 13205 Marseille Cedex 1. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gregory Cornu ().