Testing the validity of the vignette approach for improving comparability of self-reported health:

Self-assessments are often subject to heterogeneity in reporting behaviour. Anchoring vignettes have been introduced to purge self-assessments of reporting heterogeneity. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the validity of the vignette approach for improving comparability of self-reported health. This is done by observing whether correcting for reporting heterogeneity with the use of anchoring vignettes brings the self-assessments closer to the respondents’ objective health status, with the main focus being the comparison of Germany and Sweden. In particular, this paper compares adjusted self-reported health in the domain of mobility and breathing to an objective health index for German and Swedish respondents. The main results indicate that there is some mild evidence that the vignette approach improves cross-country comparability between Germany and Sweden, since it brings the self-assessments closer to the objective situation. More positive results are found for within-country validity, which reveal that adjusted self-reported health is in line, in terms of direction and significance, with objective health measures. Although this research gives some evidence in favour of the validity of the vignette approach, future research should focus on formally testing the assumptions of the anchoring vignettes, response consistency and vignette equivalence, in order to test the validity of the vignette approach more accurately.