The effects of respondent rules on health survey reports

Abstract

Survey researchers believe that self reports, in general, are more accurate than reports obtained by proxy. This paper focuses on the reassessment of previous self/proxy comparisons and presents findings from a telephone adaptation of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) designed to investigate response error associated with self and proxy reports. Unlike previous studies in which the type of report is confounded with characteristics of the population home at the time of the interview, the design of this study (random allocation to self or proxy report) allows comparison of reports from similar populations. The results show that when self response is limited to a randomly selected respondent, the self respondents report fewer health events for themselves versus for others in their household.