Project 171505

As people in many countries are living longer, health conditions that are not usually fatal, such as mental disorders, arthritis, and vision and hearing problems are becoming increasingly important aspects of health and well-being. We often measure these aspects of health by asking people to report on how much difficulty they have with certain activities or health conditions. However, people from different countries or from different backgrounds may interpret the same question differently. For example, asking a 25-year old and a 70-year old how much difficulty they have walking stairs may be difficult if the two individuals use different scales when thinking about their ability. This means that observed differences between countries or social groups reflect both objective differences in health and also differences in the way people interpret the questions. Recent developments in survey techniques now allow the possibility of accounting for differences in the way individuals understand questions about their health by using brief descriptions of specific health states to put everyone's responses on a similar scale. This study will use these 'anchors' to provide better measures of the prevalence of non-fatal health conditions across different countries, and between gender and economic groups within countries. The findings from this study will help to provide better measures of the importance of non-fatal health conditions across the globe.

investigating the role of self-report bias in health inequalities using anchoring vignettes