Conceptualization and Measurement of Health for Children in the Health Insurance Study

This volume discusses the conceptualization and measurement of the health status of children (0 to 13 years of age) in terms of physical, mental, and social health and general health perceptions. The discussion is based on Health Insurance Study (HIS) questionnaire data collected from a sample of 80...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author Eisen, Marvin
Format Report
LanguageEnglish
Published The Rand Corporation 01.05.1980
Subjects
Adolescents
Children
Health Insurance
Health Insurance Study
Health Services
Health Status
Influences
Measurement
Mental Health
Physical Health
Reliability
Scaling
Social Health
Statistical Analysis
Validity
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Summary:This volume discusses the conceptualization and measurement of the health status of children (0 to 13 years of age) in terms of physical, mental, and social health and general health perceptions. The discussion is based on Health Insurance Study (HIS) questionnaire data collected from a sample of 8000 people (enrolled in one of the HIS insurance plans) from five sites across the United States: Seattle, Washington; Fitchbur and Franklin Counties, Massachusetts; and Georgetown and Charleston Counties, South Carolina. Chapter 2 includes a literature review that describes the ways other investigators have conceptualized and measured children's physical, mental, and social health, and general health ratings, and critically evaluates the measures in terms of their apparent usefulness as indicators of health status in general populations of children. Chapter 3 describes the content of health status measures fielded for children in the HIS, summarizes demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for children and their families in HIS sites, and outlines the plan of analysis used to scale measures and study their reliability and validity. Chapter 4 presents the results of HIS scaling analysis for children, including descriptive statistics for scale scores, reliability and validity of the scales that were developed, and sociodemographic correlates of health status. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the findings of children's HIS measurement studies as compared with those reported in the literature, describes additions to the HIS mental health battery, and suggests further analyses and refinements in measurement of child health status in general populations of children. (Author/MP)