CONSTRUCTION OF HEALTH INDICES USING PAIRED COMPARISONS.

The paper discusses, by making use of past experiences in the area, the main issues and the methodology of developing a health status instrument for a developing country from a well-established instrument. The use of Thurstone's model of paired comparisons in evaluating the relative importance of health symptoms has been reviewed and some alternative models, i.e., Linear, Exponential, and Information, are proposed. By applying the models to the health data of Chinese elderly persons, the three models have been demonstrated to be able to produce some valid and responsive health scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]