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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| On the empirical association between poor health and low socioeconomic status at old age | | Author(s) | Christian Salas |
| Journal title | Health Economics, vol 11, part 3, 2002 |
| Pages | pp 207-220 |
| Keywords | Ill health ; Poor elderly ; Economic status [elderly] ; Correlation. |
| Annotation | Epidemiological 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 older people in samples on which the epidemiological 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. In this instance, the author uses data on older men and women from the 1991 and 1995 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). 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. (OFFPRINT.) (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020626203 A |
| Classmark | CH: F:W6: F:W: 49 * |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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