William_Quixote comments on Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world... - Less Wrong

1 Post author: Louie 04 February 2013 06:03AM

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Comment author: William_Quixote 04 February 2013 06:21:02AM 6 points [-]

Who did they poll? If they polled a bunch of university students in boulder Colorado they might well have been correct in thinking themselves highly healthy. A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.

That said, although folks may not be as clueless as it seems, it's still a sad result.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2013 04:07:08PM *  7 points [-]

The US data is from the NHIS 2009

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/about_nhis.htm

For 2006-2010, the households and noninstitutional group quarters selected for interview each week in the NHIS are a probability sample representative of the target population. Beginning in 2011, the minimum time length for a probability sample changed from a week to a month. With four sample panels and no sample cuts or augmentations, the expected NHIS sample size (completed interviews) is approximately 35,000 households containing about 87,500 persons. [...] The annual response rate of NHIS is close to 90 percent of the eligible households in the sample.

Other countries' (pdf) surveys seem to have similarly large and representative samples.

Comment author: Louie 04 February 2013 06:25:30AM 1 point [-]

A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.

I assumed that at first too. It turns out even removing the poor or minorities from the sample doesn't fix this gap.

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