How is your health in general? : qualitative and quantitative studies on self-assessed health and socioeconomic differences herein

Measuring perceived health status through the single item "How is your health in general?" has appealed to many researchers. Understandably, as it is an easy to administer, highly reliable measure, 'vith strong predictive validity and -at the individual level- high content validity. However, although many (mostly quantitative) studies have been conducted on the single-item measure of self-assessed health, investigators have not been able to determine all dimensions which are involved in health-assessments. This illustrates that the greatest advantage of the single-item measure on self-assessed health over other measures of perceived health, the fact that it is fully individualised, is at the same time its greatest disadvantage; the process of health assessment is more or less a "black box". We still need to find out which dimensions are involved in answering this question

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