ArticleSocial science research2021
Subjective health in adolescence: Comparing the reliability of contemporaneous, retrospective, and proxy reports of overall health.
Article in Social science research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The buffering effect of social support on the link between biologically embedded childhood maltreatment and adult cardiovascular disease.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Influencing factors, gender differences and the decomposition of inequalities in cognitive function in Chinese older adults: a population-based cohort study.BMC geriatrics · 2024Article
- Resentment Is Like Drinking Poison? The Heterogeneous Health Effects of Affective Polarization.Journal of health and social behavior · 2022Article
- Fifty years of structural equation modeling: A history of generalization, unification, and diffusion.Social science research · 2022Article
- Neighborhood structural disadvantage and biological aging in a sample of Black middle age and young adults.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Self-rated health (SRH) is one of the most important social science measures of health. Yet its measurement properties remain poorly understood. Most studies ignore the measurement error in SRH despite the bias resulting from even random measurement error. Our goal is to estimate the measurement reliability of SRH in contemporaneous, retrospective, and proxy indicators. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to estimate the reliability of SRH relative to proxy assessments and respondents' recollections of past health. Even the best indicators - contemporaneous self-reports - have a modest reliability of ~0.6; retrospective and proxy assessments fare much worse, with reliability less than 0.2. Moreover, not correcting for measurement error in SRH leads to a ~20-40% reduction in its correlation with other measures of health. Researchers should be skeptical of analyses that treat these subjective reports as explanatory variables and fail to take account of their substantial measurement error.
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