PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Phillip Cantu
AU  - Connor M. Sheehan
AU  - Benjamin W. Domingue
TI  - A broad sense measure of health and its properties in the HRS
AID  - 10.1101/081232
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 081232
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/16/081232.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/16/081232.full
AB  - 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.