Background, attitudinal and behavioural patterns of individuals occupying eight discrete health states.

This paper examines the backgrounds, attitudes, and behavioural characteristics of individuals occupying the eight discrete health states posited in Wolinsky's recently developed comprehensive health status model. Analysis of variance indicates that age, occupation, education, income, private indemnity insurance coverage, expecting sick role legitimation, use of physician specialists, and having regular sources and sites of health care delivery are differentially distributed across the eight health states. Multiple classification and discriminant function analyses indicate that the pattern reflected in these data is the traditional relationship of health status to socioeconomic status, its second order benefits, and its correlates. Forty-one per cent of all the individuals studied could be correctly placed into their proper health states by using two discriminant functions reflecting socioeconomic status and related characteristics. Regression models using these same socioeconomic and related characteristics explained 32 per cent of the variance in both an abbreviated form of the polytomous health status measure and a continuously coded version of it. Based on the differential utility of regression models severally predicting the individual health states, we propose merging the social class and drift hypotheses to explain the pervasive relationship between socioeconomic status and health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]