ABSTRACT
This chapter examines about comparative survey on health and health-related lifestyles of adult populations in 1991 in Moscow and Helsinki, the capitals of the neighbouring countries Russia and Finland. It aims to shed light on the problems of comparative health research by exploring the content and dimensions of a version of the global measure of self-assessed health. Self-rated health seems to be an overall assessment, in which medically established morbidity, subjective experience of illness and its functional consequences, as well as somatic and psychological symptoms which exceed some perceived average are taken into account. There was more diversity in reporting single symptoms and their connections with self-rated health between the cities and between men and women. However, that the self-rating of health with one simple question continues to be an important and useful method of assessing overall health. The role of culture in definitions of illness and health has also been addressed in comparative anthropological and ethnographic studies.
