A cross-national assessment of gender differences in self-assessed health:Results from SHARE

The purpose of this study is to examine the important determinants of health self-assessments and the degree to which they can account for gender differences among older adults in a cross-national setting.

Data come from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a multi-national, longitudinal survey of non-institutionalized national populations 50 years and older with a total sample size of roughly 29,000 at baseline. Countries in this analysis included representative national samples from Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Greece.

We constructed a measure of health status using information from two questions on general health asked of each SHARE respondent and then we undertake an examination of the relationship of important measured aspects of health to our constructed health score to both identify the most important factors influencing health ratings and to determine to what extent they are responsible for gender differences in each of the 11 countries.

Our analytical approach involves a sequential examination of blocks of factors using STATA linear regression; these factors include demographic characteristics, diseases/conditions, symptoms, including cognitive and affective scores, and physical functioning. Analyses were performed for men and women separately.