PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Baker, Michael
AU  - Stabile, Mark
AU  - Deri, Catherine
TI  - What Do Self-Reported, Objective, Measures of Health Measure?
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.39.4.1067
DP  - 2004 Oct 02
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 1067--1093
VI  - 39
IP  - 4
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/39/4/1067.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/39/4/1067.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2004 Oct 02; 39
AB  - Survey reports of the incidence of chronic conditions are considered by many researchers to be more objective, and thus preferable, measures of unobserved health status than self-assessed measures of global well being. In this paper we evaluate this hypothesis by attempting to validate these “objective, self-reported” measures of health. Our analysis makes use of a unique data set that matches a variety of self-reports of health with respondents’ medical records. We find that these measures are subject to considerable response error resulting in large attenuation biases when they are used as explanatory variables.