Are the Self-Rated Health, Education and Economics the Best Indicators to Measure the Social Perception and Behaviour in a Public Health Survey?: A New Framework for Measurement Invisible Inequalities

There is a growing interest in the role of public opinion in explaining patterns of population health. Attitude and and opinion data provide a basis for inferring the meaning of opinions held by individuals and society and also for predictions about their future behaviour. Despite the existence of impressive bodies of literature on the subject, there are still many unanswered questions about the changing nature of opinion expression and assessment. This paper discusses the relationship between public opinion shape in public health and its levels of credibility in introducing variations on measurement instruments. In doing so, this analysis departs from the influence of standard approach which puts forward a dominant explanatory set of variables (self-rated health, education and economics) versus non 'standarized' health questionnaire constructed ad hoc. The new framework for conceptualizing and measuring public health through specific statistical analysis conducted by us (logistic regressions, multiple correspondence analysis and cluster), explains the pocesses and drivers by which society adopt and express particular opinions in this crucial issue. In this respect, exploring public opinion by introducing more innovative variables such as the level of awareness an problematization of health and disease (concerns projections), spiral of silence (no responses / neutrality), political attitudes (conservative versus progressists) post-thruth assessments and self-preventive representation inter alia, has allowed us to discover new compless interrelations with these variables. This study is an advance of the results of the first survey on "public health" held in Spain on the basis of qualitative and quantitative methodology (N=2000). Our findings suggest revisiting the instruments of mesure of population health. This approach further shows the utility to change current instruments in order to identify crucial population targets, inequalities in health and new directions in risk that appear "invisivilized" in standard health surveys.