title: Comments on health indicators: methodological perspectives.
abstract: This paper discusses several basic conceptual and methodological problems in the development and use of health indicators. We observe that two tendencies of the health indicators movement may deter progress toward producing informations of health status indexes and the tendency to conceptualize "health" in terms of expansive definitions should measure variables specified by a social system model and should be scaled according to units that are relevant to decision-making criteria.
mesh_terms: D003657:Decision Making; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D008722:Methods; D008962:Models, Theoretical