The measurement of current perceived health among Chinese people in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, southern China

Abstract

General percelved health might be considered as a trait measure of perceived health and has been shown to be a reliable predictor of mortality. Current perceived health might be thought of as a state measure and as such should be more sensitive to short-term changes in health status. This paper describes the development of an instrument, the CPH-42 which measures current perceived health among Chinese people. Over 1000 items associated with ill-health were collected after inter-viewing 90 subjects from out-patient and in-patient settings. To these were added 38 items from section 1 of the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) and the Chinese Health Questionnaire (CHQ30), measures of functional status and mental health respectively. These items were administered to four groups of subjects and 42 items were extracted using discriminant analysis to create the CPH-42. Results show low levels of conceptual overlap between the CHQ30 and CPH-42, and slightly more overlap between the NHP and CPH-42. Subjects' health care utilization behaviour was linearly related to rated current perceived health. It is concluded that the instrument is both a valid and reliable tool (Guttman's split-half coefficient r=0.85) which measures a distinct area of subjective health and is shown to predict health services utilization behaviour significantly better than general perceived health.