A New Short Generic Measurement of Health Status: Measuring Generic Health With the Minimum European Health Module

Patrick Lazarevic , Vienna Institute of Demography
Marc Luy, Vienna Institute of Demography
Martina Brandt, TU Dortmund University

In this short report, we describe preliminary results regarding the feasibility and utility of using the Minimum European Health Module (MEHM) as a short scale for measuring generic health using data from our module in an online survey carried out by Statistik Austria. We demonstrate the feasibility of extracting a factor score from MEHM utilizing confirmatory factor analyses based on polychoric correlations. Further analyses suggest that this factor score might be useful in reducing bias in generic health measurement due to optimism and social desirability.

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 Presented in Session 11. Health & Mortality 2