Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Verbal surveys are the most common way of gauging any
population’s health status, but questions remain regarding the accuracy
of the responses they elicit. The present paper compares women’s
self-reports regarding their experiences with reproductive tract
infections (RTIs) and the medical diagnosis that they went through to
ascertain the presence or otherwise of the infections. Weak concordance
was found between women’s self-reports and the medical diagnosis, with
the former over-representing the presence of infections. Some of the
selfreported symptoms were pathogenic in nature, as represented by the
true positive reports, but the majority of the self-reports were false
positives when compared to medical diagnosis. The conventional health
surveys, relying solely on verbal responses, thus, do not essentially
represent the actual health situation of a population studied, and any
policy intervention formulated exclusively on this information would be
flawed. There is a need to understand the non-medical context of
illnesses to understand the disease fully. JEL classification: I000,
I190 Keywords: Health, Reproductive Health, Health Surveys’
Accuracy</jats:p>