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On the empirical association between poor health and low socioeconomic status at old age
Author(s) -
Salas Christian
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.663
Subject(s) - socioeconomic status , demography , health indicator , gerontology , association (psychology) , medicine , self rated health , health equity , environmental health , psychology , public health , population , sociology , nursing , psychotherapist
Epidemiologic studies using mortality rates as indicators of health fail to find any meaningful association between poor health and low socioeconomic status in older age‐groups, whereas economic studies using self‐assessed health consistently find a significant positive correlation, even after controlling for self‐reporting errors. Such contradictory results have not been reported for working age individuals. A simple explanation might be that the elderly samples on which the epidemiologic and economic studies are based come from different populations. However, this paper shows that similar contradictory results are obtained even when the same samples are used, simply by switching between self‐assessed health and mortality as health indicators. An alternative explanation is proposed, namely that these health indicators yield different results because they relate to different ranges of the latent health variable at old age. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.