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Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans

This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes...

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Autores principales: Spitzer, Sonja, Weber, Daniela
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6783110/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31593576
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223526
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author Spitzer, Sonja
Weber, Daniela
author_facet Spitzer, Sonja
Weber, Daniela
author_sort Spitzer, Sonja
collection PubMed
description This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions.
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spelling pubmed-67831102019-10-19 Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans Spitzer, Sonja Weber, Daniela PLoS One Research Article This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions. Public Library of Science 2019-10-08 /pmc/articles/PMC6783110/ /pubmed/31593576 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223526 Text en © 2019 Spitzer, Weber http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Spitzer, Sonja
Weber, Daniela
Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title_full Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title_fullStr Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title_full_unstemmed Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title_short Reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans
title_sort reporting biases in self-assessed physical and cognitive health status of older europeans
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6783110/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31593576
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223526
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