RESEP PhD alumni, Laura Rossouw, has published one of her PhD chapters in the latest issue of top-rated demography journal, Demography. The article is co-authored by Eddy van Doorslaer and Teresa Bago d’Uva from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The article examines how level of wealth and self-reported race affects our assessment of our health. Using anchoring vignettes to create a shared benchmark, the authors compare how different people rate the same health condition. They find that when a wealthy and a poor respondent experience the same health condition, such as for instance having difficulty walking, a wealthy respondent would rate their health as being more severely affected compared to a poor respondent. The same is true when looking within race groups. This matters because it means that self-reported health questions (widely available in household surveys) will cause us to underestimate inequalities in health outcomes.
The full article is available here.
