Anchoring Vignettes in the XXXX : How Do Medical Professionals and Disability Recipients Characterize the Severity of Work Limitations?

@entity1 @entity308 @entity283 @entity158 @entity65
PURPOSE: Recent studies report systematic differences in how individuals categorize the severity of identical health and work limitation vignettes. We investigate how health professionals and disability recipients characterize the severity of work limitations and whether their reporting patterns are robust to demographic, education, and health characteristics. We use the results to illustrate the potential impact of reporting heterogeneity on the distribution of work disability estimated from self-reported categorical health and disability data. METHOD: Nationally representative data on anchoring disability vignettes from the 2004 @entity283 ( @entity283 ) are used to investigate how respondents with an occupation background in health and Social Security disability beneficiaries categorize work limitation vignettes. Using @entity158 , @entity65 , and @entity308 vignettes, we estimate generalized ordered probit models (N = 2,660 individuals or 39,681 @entity1 -vignette observations) that allow the severity thresholds to vary by respondent characteristics. RESULTS: We find that health professionals (excluding nurses) and disability recipients tend to classify identical work limitations as more severe compared to non-health professional non-disabled respondents. For disability recipients, the differences are most pronounced and particularly visible in the tails of the work limitations distribution. For health professionals, we observe smaller differences, affecting primarily the classification of mildly and moderately severe work limitations. The patterns for health professionals (excluding nurses) are robust to demographics, education, and health conditions. The greater likelihood of viewing the vignette @entity1 as more severely work limited observed among disability recipients is mostly explained by the fact that these respondents also tend to be in poorer health which itself predicts a more inclusive scale. CONCLUSIONS: Knowledge of reporting scales from health professionals and disabled individuals can benefit researchers in a broad range of applications in health and disability research. They may be useful as reference scales to evaluate disability survey data. Such knowledge may be beneficial when studying disability programs. Given the increasing availability of anchoring vignette data in surveys, this is a promising area for future evaluation research.
