A cross-sectional and semantic investigation of self-rated health in the northern Sweden MONICA-study

• Main Authors: G Waller, P Thalén, Göran Waller, Peder Thalén, Urban Janlert, Katarina Hamberg, Annika Forssén
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1055.1618; http://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2%3A600160/FULLTEXT01.pdf

A cross-sectional and semantic investigation of self-rated health in the northern Sweden MONICA-study. Methodology, 12: 154 http://dx.doi. org/10.1186/1471-2288-12-154 Access to the published version may require subscription. N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper. BMC Medical Research Permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-64328 R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E Open Access A cross-sectional and semantic investigation of self-rated health in the northern Sweden MONICA-study The aim of this paper is to examine the meaning of two questions on self-rated health, the statistical distribution of the answers, and whether the context of the question in a questionnaire affects the answers. Methods: Statistical and semantic methodologies were used to analyse the answers of two different SRH questions in a cross-sectional survey, the MONICA-project of northern Sweden. Results: The answers from 3504 persons were analysed. The statistical distributions of answers differed. The most common answer to the General SRH was "good", while the most common answer to the Comparative SRH was "similar". The semantic analysis showed that what is assessed in SRH is not health in a medical and lexical sense but fields of association connected to health, for example health behaviour, functional ability, youth, looks, way of life. The meaning and function of the two questions differ -mainly due to the comparing reference in Comparative SRH. The context in the questionnaire may have affected the statistics. Conclusions: Health is primarily assessed in terms of its sense-relations (associations) and Comparative SRH and General SRH contain different information on SRH. Comparative SRH is semantically more distinct. The context of the questions in a questionnaire may affect the way self-rated health questions are answered. Comparative SRH should not be eliminated from use in questionnaires. Its usefulness in clinical encounters should be investigated.