Comparability of Health Care Responsiveness in Europe using anchoring vignettes from SHARE

The aim of this paper is to measure and to correct for the potential incomparability of responses to the SHARE survey on health care responsiveness. A parametric approach based on the use of anchoring vignettes is applied to cross-sectional data (2006-07) in ten European countries. More than 6,000 respondents aged 50 years old and over were asked to assess the quality of health care responsiveness in three domains: waiting time for medical treatment, quality of the conditions in visited health facilities, and communication and involvement in decisions about the treatment. Chopit models estimates suggest that reporting heterogenity is influenced by both individual (socio-economic, health) and national characteristics. Although correction for differential item functioning does not considerably modify countries ranking after controlling for the usual covariates, about two thirds of the respondents' self-assessments have been re-scaled in each domain. Our results suggest that reporting heterogenity tends to overestimate health care responsiveness for "time to wait for treatment", whereas it seems to underestimate people's self-assessment in the two other domains.