The Association of Health Status and Medical Utilization in Five Central Conuties in Taiwan: The Suitability of Sf-36 Health Questionnaire

• Main Authors: Li, Chia Ing, 李佳霙
• Other Authors: Lai Jim-Shoung, Li Tasi-Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1997
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18895037307719076431

碩士 === 中國醫藥學院 === 環境醫學研究所 === 85 === ABSTRACT In the past few years, it has been increasing consensus about the importance of subjective accounts of health in monitoring medical outcomes. It can be used to compair the health status among countries or areas and to provide information for health policy making. SF-36 health questionnaire, which includes eight dimensions and health transition, is a simple, brief, easy administration questionnaire. In recent, SF-36 health questionnaire is used in health related researches of different countries and populations. To estimate the reliability and the validity of SF-36 health questionnaire in different languages is an important issue. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity in Chinese version of SF-36 health questionnaire and to assess the effect of health status measured by SF-36 health questionnaire on medical utilization. The medical utilization model of this study adopted Anderson''''s model including predisposing, enabling and need characters for this study''''s main variables. The data for analysis consists 1993 residents of aged 18 to 65 in five central counties in 1994 and 1995, which were obtained from a study sponsored by Department of Health the Executive Yuan. Cross-sectional study was applied to probe into the association of health status and medical utilization in 1995. Longitudinal study was used to examine the validity of health transition variable. The subjects'''' mean age were 39.8(13.1 and eight dimension range from 67.6 to 94.4. Cronbach''''s ( reliabilities were above the 0.70. The overall success rates for convergent validity and discrimininant validity were both 97.14%. Validation by independent clinical variable was consistent with theory, but the factorial validity was not consistent with theory proposed by John Ware. Our results about medical utilization revealed that ageing population had higher utilization of outpatient service than young population, so did female than male. The higher scores of bodily pain or general health had lower utilization of outpatient service. The higher scores of vitality or general health had lower utility of hospitalization. If the number of local drug stores per ten thousand persons or the ratio of MD to traditional practitioner was higher, the utility of hospitalization will be higher. The possible explanations for the inconsistency between factorial validity and the results that violating theoretical factorial validity include the interview bias, translation bias or differential mental health expression in Chinese and Western people. But this question needs more studies to search for in the future.