BACKGROUND To analyse time trends in self-rated health in older people by gender and age and examine disability in the time trends of self-rated health. METHODS The data used come from the Spanish National Health Surveys conducted in 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2011-12. Samples of adults aged 16 yr and older were selected. Multivariate logistic regression was used to assess the association between a...

INTRODUCTION Vaccine hesitancy and refusal continue to be a global challenge to reaching immunization targets, especially among those in traditional or fundamentalist religions. The apostolic faith in Zimbabwe has been historically associated with objection to most medical interventions, including immunization. METHODS We conducted a descriptive analysis of socio-demographic characteristics a...

The estimation of socioeconomic inequalities has lately become one of the major topics in public health research, as the numerous studies are showing strong association of inequalities with health status and outcomes. The aim of this study was to provide a general overview of the individual data available for the socioeconomic inequalities estimation from a public health survey and to compare d...

It is widely accepted that researchers have an obligation to inform survey participants of research results. However, there is little evidence on the effectiveness of various dissemination strategies. The emerging field of knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) may offer insight given its focus on techniques to enhance the effectiveness of communicating evidence-based information. To date, KTE h...

BACKGROUND The Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) fills important health information gaps, but the feasibility of using it for immigrant research is unknown. DATA AND METHODS Weighted estimates of socio-demographic variables by immigrant status from the combined cycles 1 and 2 of the CHMS (2007 to 2009 and 2009 to 2011) were compared with distributions from the 2006 Census and the 2011 Na...

We introduce this special issue on the critical matter of whether the existing household panel surveys in the U.S. are adequate to address the important emerging social science and policy questions of the next few decades. We summarize the conference papers which address this issue in different domains. The papers detail many new and important emerging research questions but also identify key l...

BACKGROUND Studies on the association between health and neighborhood ethnic composition yielded inconsistent results, possibly due to methodological limitations. We assessed these associations at different spatial scales and for different measures of ethnic composition. METHODS We obtained health survey data of 4673 respondents of Dutch, Surinamese, Moroccan, Turkish other non-Western and ot...

BACKGROUND Most migrant studies have compared health characteristics between migrants and nationals of the host country. We aimed at comparing health characteristics of migrants with nationals from their home country. METHODS Portuguese national health survey (2005-6; 30,173 participants aged 18-75 years) and four national health surveys conducted in Switzerland (2002, 2004, 2007 and 2011, to...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Out-of-hours services for primary care provision are increasing in policy relevance. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore service users' recent experiences of out-of-hours services and to identify suggestions for improvement for services and practitioners involved. METHODS We used data from a cross-sectional survey of service users' self-reported experienc...

Over the past 100 years the state of Guanajuato has consistently been one of the highest migrant sending states in Mexico. Youth living in high migratory states such as Guanajuato are heavily influenced by the expectation that they will travel to the US, and research has shown that those who do not migrate may be looked down upon by members of their community. This secondary analysis looks at t...