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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Measuring Subjective Health and Life Satisfaction with U.S. Hispanics
Year 2017
Access date 15.09.2017
Abstract Health and well-being are two important issues not only in research but also in policy. While accurate measurement of these attributes is critical, extant research indicates its difficulty in survey research. The main difficulties stem from the subjective nature of the concepts of health and well-being, as well as the use of response options with vague quantifiers. These difficulties become more evident for cross-cultural studies, where the concepts of health and well-being themselves may not be comparable. Moreover, their measurement instruments may not function equivalently.

This study focuses on the U.S. Hispanics and examines three variables: 1) self-rated health (SRH) and 2) life satisfaction (LS) measured with single item and 3) LS measured with five items. On SRH, Hispanics are known to report negative health more than non-Hispanic Whites, and non-equivalent translation of the English response categories of “excellent,” “very good,” “good,” “fair,” and “poor” has been hypothesized as a potential contributor. With the 5-item LS scale, all items are stated in a positive direction and asked with the Likert-type agreement response scale. As Hispanics are shown to be associated with acquiescent response style, the current 5-item LS scale may lead to an overestimation of LS for Hispanics. Motivated by these specific issues, we implemented the following experiments: 1) on SRH, translation of the response category, “fair,” into “regular” versus “passable”; and 2) on the five-item LS scale, direction of item wordings to be all positive versus balanced. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions under each experiment. Using this experimental data, we will examine simple response distribution, item characteristics based on item response theory and relationships across three measures. These examinations will be carried out by considering interview language. The main data will come from a telephone survey of 1,296 U.S. Hispanics, supplemented by a Web survey a nonprobability sample of 1,416 Spanish speakers in the U.S. The web survey data was provided by SurveyMonkey, but all analysis will be done by the authors.
Year of publication2017
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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Web survey bibliography (4086)

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