The comparability of perceived physical and mental health measures across immigrants and natives in the United States

Abstract

The comparative study of perceived physical and mental health in general—and the comparative study of health between the native-born and immigrants, in particular—requires that the groups understand survey questions inquiring about their health in the same way and display similar response patterns. After all, observed dif­fer­ences in per­ceived health may not reflect true dif­fer­ences but rather cul­tural bias in the health measures. Research on cross-country measurement equivalence between immigrants and natives on self-reported health measures has received very limited attention to date, resulting in a growing demand for the validation of existing perceived health measures using samples of natives and immigrants and establishing measurement equivalence of health-related assessment tools. This study, therefore, aims to examine measurement equivalence of self-reported physical and mental health indica tors between immigrants and natives in the United States. Using pooled data from the 2015–2017 IPUMS Health Surveys, we examine the cross-group measurement equiv­a­lence prop­er­ties of five con­cepts that are mea­sured by mul­ti­ple indi­ca­tors: (1) per­ceived lim­i­ta­tions in activ­i­ties of daily life; (2) self-reported dis­abil­ity; (3) per­ceived func­tional lim­i­ta­tions; (4) per­ceived finan­cial stress; and (5) nonspecific psy­cho­log­i­cal distress. Furthermore, we examine the comparability of these data among respondents of different ethnoracial origins and from different regions of birth, who report few versus many years since migration, their age, gender, and the language used to respond to the inter­view (e.g., English vs. Span­ish). We test for mea­sure­ment equiv­a­lence using mul­ti­group con­fir­ma­tory fac­tor anal­y­sis. The results reveal that health scales are compa­ra­ble across the exam­ined groups. This find­ing allows draw­ing mean­ing­ful con­clusions about similarities and differences among natives and immigrants on measures of perceived health in these data.