A note on validating Wagstaff and van Doorslaer's health measure in the analysis of inequalities in health

The aim of this note is to validate Wagstaff and van Doorslaer's approach o f constructing a continuous health measure to be used in the analysis of in equalities in health. We calculate health concentration indices for Uppsala County in Sweden based on three different health status measures: health m easured according to the WvD approach based on a self-assessed categorical health measure, health measured by the rating scale method, and health meas ured by the time trade-off method. The concentration index does not differ significantly for the three health status measures, and our results thus su pport the validity of the WvD method. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All ri ghts reserved.