Comments on Health Indicators: Methodological Perspectives

This paper discusses several basic conceptual and methodological problems in the development and use of health indicators. We observe that two tendencies of the health indicators movement may deter progress toward producing information useful in decision making, namely, the quest for elegant mathematical formulations of health status indexes and the tendency to conceptualize “health” in terms of expansive definitions. To improve the utility of such information, it is suggested that health indicators should measure variables specified by a social system model and should be scaled according to units that are relevant to decision-making criteria.

[1]  M. Lerner.  Conceptualization of health and social well-being. , 1973, Health services research.

[2]  Michael E. Spautz.  The socio-economic gap , 1972 .

[3]  S. Goldsmith.  The status of health status indicators. , 1972, Health services reports.

[4]  Michael E. Spautz.  The Socioeconomic Gap. , 1972 .

[5]  D. Sullivan,et al.  A single index of mortality and morbidity. , 1971, HSMHA health reports.

[6]  P. Henriot.  Political Questions About Social Indicators , 1970 .

[7]  Michael S. Springer.  Social Indicators, Reports, and Accounts: Toward the Management of Society , 1970 .

[8]  M. Olson.  An Analytic Framework for Social Reporting and Policy Analysis , 1970 .

[9]  C. Agócs.  Social Indicators: Selected Readings , 1970 .

[10]  H. Freeman,et al.  Notes on social indicators: Promises and potential , 1970 .

[11]  W. J. Cohen.  Social Indicators: Statistics for Public Policy , 1968 .

[12]  E. Kalimo,et al.  The Need for Medical Care: Estimation on the Basis of Interview Data , 1968 .

[13]  B. Gross,et al.  New Goals for Social Information , 1967 .

[14]  D. Rice,et al.  Estimating the cost of illness. , 1967, American journal of public health and the nation's health.

[15]  James D. Thompson.  Organizations in Action , 1967 .

[16]  I. K. Zola.  Culture and symptoms--an analysis of patients' presenting complaints. , 1966, American sociological review.

[17]  B. Gross.  The social state of the union , 1965 .

[18]  B. Gross.  PLANNING:Let’s Not Leave It to the Economists , 1965 .

[19]  C L CHIANG,et al.  AN INDEX OF HEALTH: MATHEMATICAL MODELS. , 1965, Vital and health statistics. Ser. 1, Programs and collection procedures.

[20]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The new science of management decision , 1960 .

[21]  Carl G. Hempel,et al.  Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science , 1952 .