On the empirical association between poor health and low socioeconomic status at old age
研究发现，使用死亡率作为健康指标时，老年群体中健康状况不佳与社会经济地位低下之间无显著关联，而使用自评健康指标则呈现显著正相关，且这种矛盾在同一老年样本中依然存在，提示不同健康指标可能反映潜在健康变量的不同范围。
Epidemiologic 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 elderly samples on which the epidemiologic 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. 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.