infonet-economy

In most health survey the state of health of individuals is measured through several different kinds of variables such as qualitative, discrete quantitative or dichotomic ones. From these variables, one aims at building univariate indices of health that summarize the information. To do so, we propose in this paper to use Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVM) (see e.g. Bartholomew and Knott 1999), which allows to estimate one or more continuous latent variables from a set of observable ones. As an application, we consider the data from the 1997 Swiss Health Survey and build two health indicators. The first one describes the health status induced merely by the age of the subject, and the second one complements the first one.