Personality traits and academic performance: Correcting self-assessed traits with vignettes

[The gender paradox in health-impaired lifetime-end of a myth?]

BACKGROUND

Women live longer than men, but they spend more life years with health-impairment. This article examines the extent to which this gender paradox can be explained by two factors: the "mortality effect," which results from the higher life expectancy of women, and "differential item functioning" (DIF), which refers to gender differences in reporting behavior.

METHODS

Impaired life expectancy at age 50 is calculated for the health indicators general health, limitations, and chronic morbidity using the Sullivan method. Data on health prevalence are obtained from the 2012 survey "Gesundheit in Deutschland aktuell" (GEDA), data on mortality is taken from the Human Mortality Database. The gender difference in impaired life expectancy is decomposed into the mortality effect and the health effect. The latter is finally adjusted for DIF effects on the basis of vignettes from the 2004 SHARE survey.

RESULTS

The gender paradox can be resolved not only partially but completely for all three health indicators considered by the mortality effect and DIF. After taking these two factors into account, the gender difference in impaired life expectancy reverses from higher values for women to higher values for men.

DISCUSSION

The causes of the gender paradox are highly complex and the differences between women and men in total and impaired life expectancy are not necessarily going into contradictory directions. The extent of women's higher impaired life expectancy depends decisively on the underlying health indicator and is largely explained by the mortality effect.

The impact of interpersonal reporting heterogeneity on cross-country differences in Healthy Life Years in Europe

BACKGROUND

The European Union has used Healthy Life Years (HLY) as an indicator to monitor the health of its aging populations. Scholarly and popular interest in HLY across countries has grown, particularly regarding the ranking of countries. It is important to note that HLY is based on self-assessments of activity limitations, raising the possibility that it might be influenced by differences in health reporting behaviours between populations, a phenomenon known as differential item functioning (DIF).

METHODS

We estimated DIF-adjusted HLY at age 50 for Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden to determine the extent to which differences in HLY might be influenced by reporting heterogeneity across countries. We used anchoring vignettes, taken from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, to estimate DIF-adjusted prevalence rates of activity limitations measured by the Global Activity Limitations Indicator (GALI). The Sullivan method was used to calculate DIF-adjusted HLY.

RESULTS

Changes in HLY before and after adjustment ranged from a 1.20-year decrease for men in Italy to a 1.61-year increase for women in Spain. Adjustment for DIF produced changes in the rankings of the countries by HLY, with upward and downward movements of up to three positions.

CONCLUSION

Our results show that DIF is likely to affect HLY estimates, thereby posing a challenge to the validity of comparisons of HLY across European countries. The findings suggest that HLY should be used to monitor population health status within a country, rather than to make comparisons across countries.

Comparing the reliability and predictive power of child, teacher, and guardian reports of noncognitive skills

Children’s noncognitive or socioemotional skills (e.g., persistence and self-control) are typically measured using surveys in which either children rate their own skills or adults rate the skills of children. For many purposes—including program evaluation and monitoring school systems—ratings are often collected from multiple perspectives about a single child (e.g., from both the child and an adult). Collecting data from multiple perspectives is costly, and there is limited evidence on the benefits of this approach. Using a longitudinal survey, this study compares children’s noncognitive skills as reported by themselves, their guardians, and their teachers. Although reports from all three types of respondents are correlated with each other, teacher reports have the highest internal consistency and are the most predictive of children’s later cognitive outcomes and behavior in school. The teacher reports add predictive power beyond baseline measures of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) for most outcomes in schools. Measures collected from children and guardians add minimal predictive power beyond the teacher reports.