Self-Rated Health as a Research Artefact
10 Pages Posted: 10 Nov 2014 Last revised: 27 May 2017
Date Written: November 9, 2014
Abstract
This paper argues that self-rated health, a widely used predictor of mortality, is a research artefact which came into being through unacknowledged biomedicalization of the concept of health on the part of the research community. The statistical correlation between self-rated health and mortality is a culture-specific coincidence that is caused by a human ability to accurately assess one’s life expectancy as compared to one’s peers. In lay theories of health that are strongly influenced by Western biomedicine, health and death are closely related: the worse one’s health, the shorter one’s life. Therefore, in these populations, self-rated health implicitly contains one’s estimate of how long one will live. However, self-rated life expectancy that predicts actual mortality can be obtained just as well via a direct question without any reference to health, thus making the self-rated health as an analytical tool redundant. In ethno-cultural groups whose lay theories of health are affected by biomedicine to a limited extent or not at all, the relationship between self-rated health and death is much looser or qualitatively different and the predictive power of self-rated health significantly lower or non-existent. The argument draws on findings of comparative social science (sociology, anthropology) and STS (Science and Technology Studies).
Keywords: self-rated health, biomedicine, biomedicalization
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