THE VALIDITY OF HEALTH ASSESSMENTS - RESOLVING SOME RECENT DIFFERENCES

The purpose of this paper is to examine what is meant by a valid measure of health. Guyatt, Kirshner and Jaeschke propose that health tests should be designed so as to have one of several kinds of validity: ''longitudinal construct validity'' for those which are used for longitudinal research designs, and ''cross-sectional construct validity'' for those which are used for cross-sectional designs. Williams and Naylor argue that this approach to test classification and validation confuses what a test purports to measure with the purpose for which it is used, and that some tests have multiple uses. A review of the meanings of validity in the psychological test literature shows that both sets of authors use the term validity in an idiosyncratic way. Although the use of a test (evaluated by content validity) should not be conflated with whether the test actually measures a specified construct (evaluated by construct validity), if health is actually made up of several constructs (as suggested in Hyland's interactional model) then there may be an association between types of construct and types of purpose. Evidence is reviewed that people make several, independent judgements about their health: cognitive perceptions of health problems are likely to be more sensitive to change in a longitudinal research design, whereas emotional evaluations of health provide less bias in cross-sectional designs. Thus, a classification of health measures in terms of the purpose of the test may parallel a classification in terms of what tests purport to measure.