Lee and Schwarz Respond to Kawada, Question Context, Ethnic Difference, and Self-Rated Health

We agree with Kawada that the ideal data set for our study would include a confounder-free experiment that asks the self-rated health (SRH) question in different contexts (or order) and follows study subjects over time to assess subsequent morbidity and mortality. This data set does not exist. As an approximation with minimal methodological non-comparability, we used the National Health Interview Survey linked with the National Death Index and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine SRH context effects on health outcome predictions.