Self-reported Symptoms of Reproductive Tract Infections: The Question of Accuracy and Meaning

Verbal surveys are the most common way of gauging anypopulation’s health status, but questions remain regarding the accuracyof the responses they elicit. The present paper compares women’sself-reports regarding their experiences with reproductive tractinfections (RTIs) and the medical diagnosis that they went through toascertain the presence or otherwise of the infections. Weak concordancewas found between women’s self-reports and the medical diagnosis, withthe former over-representing the presence of infections. Some of theselfreported symptoms were pathogenic in nature, as represented by thetrue positive reports, but the majority of the self-reports were falsepositives when compared to medical diagnosis. The conventional healthsurveys, relying solely on verbal responses, thus, do not essentiallyrepresent the actual health situation of a population studied, and anypolicy intervention formulated exclusively on this information would beflawed. There is a need to understand the non-medical context ofillnesses to understand the disease fully. JEL classification: I000,I190 Keywords: Health, Reproductive Health, Health Surveys’Accuracy