Similarity of Perceived Health Between Household Members: The “Mutual Influences” Hypothesis

Abstract

Demographers and social epidemiologists have widely recognized that determinants of health operate on different levels. Among all of the relational networks, the family deserves a special place as it is the context where lifestyles and health-related behaviors are generally developed and shared. Using data from the Italian Health Interview Survey 2004/2005 for ages 18 and above, this chapter aims to provide an estimation of the magnitude of influence that the household has on self-perceived health, controlling for individual characteristics and the geographical context. We select three outcome variables to investigate perceived health: Physical Component Summary, Mental Component Summary, and poor Self-Rated Health. We develop an index of homogeneity within households and explore to what extent mutual influences of health perception exist within a household, resulting in a high resemblance of health for people living together, independent of or in addition to the effect of household covariates. Eventually, we try to gain a better understanding of the pathways through which these mutual influences are spread between people in the same household.