SELF-RATED HEALTH AND HEALTH INDEX – A REVIEW
SELF-RATED HEALTH AND HEALTH INDEX – A REVIEW

Author(s): Paula Viziteu
Subject(s): Economy, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: Editura Universităţii »Alexandru Ioan Cuza« din Iaşi
Keywords: self-rated health; health index; systematic review; health policy making;
Summary/Abstract: Self-rated health as a statistical variable commonly occurs in medical field research. Hence observing the health measures that have been featured in studies over the past few years is essential for future research. Having an overview of Self-Rated Health (SRH) is a great way to provide further solution for new approaches. This Systematic Review contributes to the literature related to health measures by summarizing the latest relevant papers published between 2018 and 19th April 2023 regarding SRH and other health approaches. Monitoring the health measures used in the relevant articles for past years and observing their frequency helps to find out if there is a need to create a better health measure. 598 open access English papers were found on Scopus by searching the terms „health index” and „self-rated health” from 2018 to 19th April 2023. The steps for this systematic review include the selection of literature, the inclusion/exclusion criteria, the screening of the SRH and other health measures of approaches and the data extraction. The review question is regarding the evaluation of SRH in comparison with other approaches: “Does SRH occur more in this sample than other health approaches?”. The aim of this review is to provide researchers and health policy makers an overview of the SRH used in latest research on Scopus by searching for both subjective and objective measure terms. The main finding was that for the selected articles the SRH is more common than the other health approaches. 77.4% of the examined abstracts include SRH and 22.6% include other health measures or health approaches or both - SRH and a different health measure or approach. A future research directive is to test a health index and compare it with the existing ones.

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