This study will determine the relationship between the Short Form General Health Survey (GHS) used in the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) and the Quality of Well-Being (QWB) scale in a population-based sample of older adults. 1350 subjects will be sampled from the Beaver Dam Eye Study (BDES) cohort, a nearly 100% sample (5838 eligible) of all adults aged 45-84 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Participants will be interviewed twice, with an interval of two years. Each interview consists of three parts, administration of the GHS, the QWB, and an protocol using time tradeoffs to determine how the subject weighs seven dimensions of health: physical function, cognitive mood, thinking ability, pain, hearing ability, visual ability, and ability to communicate through speech. Physical function here comprises three related subdimensions, mobility, role functioning, and activities of daily living. Study goals are: (1) to determine the distribution of health states in the BDES cohort as measured by (a) the GHS, and (b) the QWB. (2) to use the method of time tradeoffs to estimate individual's weighting for the seven health dimensions listed. (3) to develop a population-based transfer function from GHS measures into the QWB scale and (a) determine if this relationship changes over a time of two years for the cohort (b) determine if these relations differ in subgroups identifiable by socio-demographic or medical history, or health status. (4) use the time tradeoff data to determine whether individuals form distinct clusters in the way in which they weight the seven dimensions, and if they do (a) to determine if these are predictable using QWB or MOS measures, socio-demographic data, or medical history data. (b) to investigate incidence and predictability of longitudinal changes in viewpoints of individuals. These data give population-based estimates of the relationships between two major measures of health status (one of them preference-based), and estimate age-sex specific interval changes in these measures. They also provide population-based views on quality of life and changes in individual viewpoints.
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