| Summary: | The National Health Measurement Study (NHMS) surveyed older United States adults with a suite of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) indices to allow comparison and cross-calibration of these instruments. The design oversampled African Americans and older individuals to allow subgroup analyses. Several preference-weighted indices measuring self-reported generic HRQoL are used widely in population surveys and clinical studies in the United States and around the world. These indices are used to evaluate individual and population health. Because they have been developed using econometric methods to elicit utility weights for their scoring systems, they are generally accepted for use in cost-effectiveness analyses of health interventions. Each index uses a multidimensional representation of health, but each index covers the dimensions of health (e.g., physical function, mental function, social function, pain, other symptoms, etc.) differently, and uses questionnaires with different psychometric properties. Each index is scored so that perfect health is represented as 1.0 and dead is represented as 0.0, but they are known to have different scaling properties. Rarely have two or more of these instruments been included in a population survey, so there have been few opportunities to directly compare how they describe and measure health using multi-instrument data. In this study, respondents indicated whether they had been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, eye disease, sleep disorder, chronic respiratory disease, clinical depression or anxiety disorder, gastrointestinal ulcer, thyroid disorder, and/or severe chronic back pain. Census tract is not identified, however race composition, education levels, economic factors, and urbanicity of each respondent's census tract of residence are included as contextual variables. Demographic, socioeconomic, and additional health data were elicited. Respondents are characterized by census region of residence, age, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, education, household income and assets, health insurance, weight, height, smoking status, psychological well-being scales, and everyday and lifetime discrimination items. The data were de-identified, and extensive documentation was developed. The NHMS collected data on 3,844 adults in the continental United States (1,641 males and 2,203 females, 1,086 African Americans).
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