Rating Health and Rating Change: How Canadians Rate Their Health and Its Changes

Objectives: We investigated the contribution of five health domains to self-rated health (SRH) cross-sectionally and longitudinally and whether these contributions differ by gender or age. Methods: Employing dominance analyses, we quantified the contributions of functioning, diseases, pain, mental health, and behavior to both SRH at a point in time and for changes in SRH using data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS, 1994–2011). Results: Cross-sectionally and longitudinally, functioning was the most important health domain, followed by diseases and pain. There were no meaningful differences in the ranking by gender while functioning, diseases, and pain were more relevant in older cohorts. Discussion: Functioning, diseases, and pain systematically were the most important health domains in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. While these results held for women and men, they were more salient for older adults. This points to a gender-invariant but age-graded process, confirming previous research with European data.