| Abstract: | While health, itself, is the central concept in the sociology of health, little agreement exists on what constitutes an appropriate definition of health. This paper develops two composite health status measures (one continuous summary measure, and one set of eight discrete health state measures) based on the World Health Organization's conceptualization of the physical, social, and psychological dimensions of health. Data from a 1978 regional survey demonstrates the continuous summary measure's reliability (alpha = .70), and validity (factor analytic support for the hypothesized dimensions). The results also indicate that although either of the comprehensive measures significantly increase the goodness of fit of structural models of health service utilization, the set of discrete health state measures increases more the goodness of fit, bringing the explained variance of physician visits up from 16 percent to 30 percent. The magnitude of the increments clearly demonstrates the considerable utility of the comprehensive health status measurement approach. |
