A comparative analysis of ADL questions in surveys of older people

This article describes questions designed to assess limitations with respect to activities of daily living (ADLs) that were asked on the first wave of the AHEAD study, and it assesses their cross-sectional measurement properties. It also provides comparisons between those questions and parallel ques...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences Psychological sciences and social sciences, 1997-05, Vol.52 Spec No (Special), p.21-36
Main Authors: Rodgers, W, Miller, B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activities of Daily Living
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Geriatric Assessment
Health Services - statistics & numerical data
Health Status
Health Surveys
Humans
Regression Analysis
Reproducibility of Results
United States
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article describes questions designed to assess limitations with respect to activities of daily living (ADLs) that were asked on the first wave of the AHEAD study, and it assesses their cross-sectional measurement properties. It also provides comparisons between those questions and parallel questions that have been asked on two other surveys of the elderly population in the United States: the 1984 Supplement on Aging (SOA) to the National Health Interview Survey and the screener for the 1982 National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS). It also compares a single item from the 1990 Census. It then compares the ways in which the same individuals answer these different versions of ADL questions, using data from subsamples of the AHEAD respondents who were also asked the SOA, NLTCS, or Census questions. The analysis shows that there is a substantial amount of measurement error in the answers to ADL questions, and it suggests that this is a major contributor to apparent improvements and declines in functional health observed in longitudinal data.
ISSN:1079-5014
1758-5368
DOI:10.1093/geronb/52B.Special_Issue.21