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I feel good! Gender differences and reporting heterogeneity in self-assessed health

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Abstract

For empirical analysis and policy-oriented recommendations, the precise measurement of individual health or well-being is essential. The difficulty is that the answer may depend on individual reporting behaviour. Moreover, if an individual’s health perception varies with certain attitudes of the respondent, reporting heterogeneity may lead to index or cut-point shifts of the health distribution, causing estimation problems. An index shift is a parallel shift in the thresholds of the underlying distribution of health categories. In contrast, a cut-point shift means that the relative position of the thresholds changes, implying different response behaviour. Our paper aims to detect how socioeconomic determinants and health experiences influence the individual valuation of health. We analyse the reporting behaviour of individuals on their self-assessed health status, a five-point categorical variable. Using German panel data, we control for observed heterogeneity in the categorical health variable as well as unobserved individual heterogeneity in the panel estimation. In the empirical analysis, we find strong evidence for cut-point shifts. Our estimation results show different impacts of socioeconomic and health-related variables on the five categories of self-assessed health. Moreover, the answering behaviour varies between female and male respondents, pointing to gender-specific perception and assessment of health. Hence, in case of reporting heterogeneity, using self-assessed measures in empirical studies may be misleading and the information needs to be handled with care.

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Notes

  1. Here, respondents are asked to rate hypothetical descriptions of a fixed level of a latent construct, such as responsiveness [12].

  2. Only variables on age and gender contain no missing values.

  3. Because foreigners are under-represented in the dataset, we only concentrate on German citizens.

  4. The wording of the corresponding question is “Do you have any prolonged health problems, diseases or disabilities?”.

  5. In their analysis, Lindeboom and van Doorslaer [9] use the health utility index (HUI3) in a quadratic specification as a proxy for the latent true health status.

  6. One assumption for the threshold parameters is that κ j  ≤ κ j+1, ∀j and that κ5 = ∞ and κ0 = −∞.

  7. Alternatively, κ1 could be set to zero. This would also identify the model.

  8. Greene and Henscher [22] discuss aspects of heterogeneity in ordered choices and present a detailed description of the generalized ordered probit model.

  9. The order condition in the generalized ordered probit model requires that the predicted probabilities are in the (0; 1) interval.

  10. The generalized ordered probit model nests the standard ordered probit model with the restriction that β1 = ⋯ = β J−1.

  11. A complete description of the procedure can be found in [25]. The related user-written Stata program regoprob2 is available at the SSC archive.

  12. The estimation with different imputations requires some caution with respect to the ‘averaging’ of the results (see [26]). For the total results, it follows that the coefficient vector of the multiple imputation analysis is given by the mean of the single estimations while for the variance–covariance estimate one has to distinguish between the within- and the between-imputation variance–covariance matrix.

  13. While our analysis helps to identify possible cut-point shifts, it remains unclear whether there is also an index shift. Following the approach by Hernández-Quevedo et al. [15], we introduced time dummies for the observation years. Only for men, the year 2008 has a strong significant negative effect.

  14. Alternatively, one can use the anchoring vignettes approach. In the SAVE dataset, no such information is included.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge useful comments from two anonymous referees, Andreas Schmid, Martin Schellhorn, Stefan Boes and the participants of the 2010 annual conference of the German Association of Health Economics (dggoe) in Berlin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law and Economics, Institute of Public Finance, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Udo Schneider, Christian Pfarr, Brit S. Schneider & Volker Ulrich

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  1. Udo Schneider
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  2. Christian Pfarr
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  3. Brit S. Schneider
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Correspondence to Udo Schneider.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7.

Table 5 Random effects ordered probit estimates
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Table 6 Random effects generalized ordered probit; men
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Table 7 Random effects generalized ordered probit; women
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Schneider, U., Pfarr, C., Schneider, B.S. et al. I feel good! Gender differences and reporting heterogeneity in self-assessed health. Eur J Health Econ 13, 251–265 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-011-0301-7

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