True health vs response styles: exploring cross‐country differences in self‐reported health
利用欧洲10国22731名50岁以上受访者数据，将自评健康的跨国差异分解为真实健康差异和回答风格差异，发现丹麦和瑞典人高估、德国人低估自身健康，考虑回答风格后差异缩小但未消失。
The aim of this paper is to decompose cross-national differences in self-reported general health into parts explained by differences in 'true' health, measured by diagnosed conditions and measurements, and parts explained by cross-cultural differences in response styles. The data used were drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe 2004 (SHARE), using information from 22 731 individuals aged 50 and over from 10 European countries. Self-rated general health shows large cross-country variations. According to their self-reports, the healthiest respondents live in the Scandinavian countries and the least healthy live in Southern Europe. Counterfactual self-reported health distributions that assume identical response styles in each country show much less variation in self-reports than factual self-reports. Danish and Swedish respondents tend to largely over-rate their health (relative to the average) whereas Germans tend to under-rate their health. If differences in reporting styles are taken into account, cross-country variations in general health are reduced but not eliminated. Failing to account for differences in reporting styles may yield misleading results.