AccScience Publishing / IJPS / Volume 5 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.18063/ijps.v5i1.1015
RESEARCH ARTICLE

What’s in a word? Language and self-assessed health in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

Meredith Van Natta1 Zachary Zimmer2*
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1 Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, 94108, USA
2 Department of Family Studies and Gerontology, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3M 2J6, Canada
© Invalid date by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

This study examines the extent to which the Spanish language influences the way in which respondents report health using the ubiquitous self-assessed health (SAH) outcome. We account for citizenship status, ethnicity, and a series of other covariates. The study uses the 2003-2016 national health and nutrition examination survey (NHANES) (n=39,107). Analyses treat SAH as non-ordered categorical and employ multinomial regressions. Results indicate that those answering in Spanish are considerably and significantly more likely to rate health as “fair/regular” ceteris paribus. Non-U.S. citizens and naturalized citizens are significantly more likely to rate their health favorably in comparison to U.S.-born; those identifying as Hispanic, Black, and other/multiracial are likely to rate health less favorably than others regardless of citizenship or interview language. A model that examines only foreign-born and accounts for years lived in the U.S. shows Spanish language still strongly predicted SAH outcomes, but years spent in the U.S. did not, a finding that does not support notions of acculturation. The study concludes that there is a language bias in the standard SAH measure typically used national-level health surveys and national-level surveys such as NHANES should adjust the question translation to better understand the health of immigrants.

Keywords
self-assessed health
citizenship status
immigrant health
NHANES
survey language
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