TY - JOUR T1 - A broad sense measure of health and its properties in the HRS JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/081232 SP - 081232 AU - Phillip Cantu AU - Connor M. Sheehan AU - Benjamin W. Domingue Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/16/081232.abstract N2 - Measuring health is a crucial component of much social research. Two approaches are typical. Health may be measured via either narrowly targeted questions about aspects of disability or chronic conditions. Alternatively, individuals may be asked to self-report their health in some global sense. Both approaches have potential drawbacks. We consider a broad sense measure of health constructed by items from five different batteries related to physical and mental wellbeing. We demonstrate that this measure predicts time until death better than self-reported health, especially for females. Although this measure has promise, we argue that future surveys on health would benefit from the inclusion of additional items focusing on issues salient to younger individuals or other non-disabled respondents. ER -