ABSTRACT

The reduction of health inequalities is one of the main targets of the National Health Strategy announced in 2013 by the French Ministry of Health. Health status can be measured by many indicators such as mortality, morbidity, and functional limitations. Nevertheless, all indicators do not similarly describe inequalities in health. Some recent studies thus focused on reporting heterogeneity related to self-assessed health, which is the most regularly collected measurement of health in household surveys. Even if this indicator is a good predictor of mortality and health-care utilization, it is also the result of a complex aggregation process of several elements that an individual knows about their own health status. The factor analysis empirically determines the number of relevant factors summarizing the information of these four health indicators, that is, the number of subjacent latent variables that influence responses to health indicators.