Survey Measurement of Health

Dr. Apostolos Davillas is Principal Investigator on an ESRC research project on the survey measurement of health and its implications for biosocial research. Prof. Andrew M. Jones (UoYork) is the Co-Investigator for this project. The project is scheduled to begin in June 2021 for 18 months.

The interplay between socioeconomic circumstances and health is of major importance for well-being and for human capital investment. The majority of the research on this topic is conducted using self-reported health measures. The fact that self-reported measures have been used widely in several disciplines is not surprising as these measures are routinely collected in major national and international surveys. The popularity of self-reported measures of overall health is driven by their simplicity and low collection costs however there are concerns that there may be biases in these measures. Existing evidence is inconclusive: some shows that there are discrepancies between self-reported health measures and directly measured health status, while other studies show that mapping of biological risks into categorical measures of self-assessed health varies with individual characteristics, known as “cut-point shift”. 

In this project, we will employ data from the ESRC funded national panel, Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to make a number of contributions to the survey measurement of health in the context of social science research. Specifically, we will focus on individuals’ response inconsistencies in the most popular self-reported health measure, self-assessed health, and on its interpretation as a measure of individuals’ underlying health. The project will explore the implications for existing social science research that is based on self-reported health measures. 

Updates and output of this research project will be available here and via the project’s Twitter account.