Addi van Bergen

Chapter 4 78 corresponded to the lowest income quintile in 2010 (data source: CBS). Health problems included in the study were: fair or poor self-rated health (versus good or very good); being diagnosed with at least one chronic condition; impaired hearing, sight and / or mobility; and high risk for anxiety and depression disorder (score 30 or higher on Kessler psychological distress scale). The significance level for testing was set at 0.001. Construct validity was considered adequate if at least 75% of the hypotheses were confirmed [46]. 5. Generalisability: We replicated the construction of the SEI-HS in the validation sample. As suggested in the literature we compared for similarities of the canonical functions [44, 47]. If marked differences are found, the results may be specific to the sample data only and cannot be generalised to the population. Statistical analysis Analyses were carried out using SPSS version 19.0 and SPSS AMOS version 22.0. RESULTS Participants Table 2 presents the socio-demographic characteristics of the study sample. The average age in the unweighted sample was 54.8 years and there were slightly more women than men. Compared to the Dutch population as a whole, our study sample was substantially older and included a lower percentage of respondents from (very) highly urbanised areas and from rural areas. Also, men, respondents of non-Western ethnic background and respondents with low income were under-represented in the study sample. These differences largely disappeared after weighting for sample coverage and non-response (Table 2). Table 2. Sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents in the study sample (N=258,928) compared to the Dutch population. Characteristics Study sample Unweighted Study sample Weighted Dutch population a Sex: male (%) 45.2 49.1 49.0 Age (mean, SD) 54.8 (17.7) 48.7 (17.6) 48.8 Ethnic background: non-Western (%) 5.2 10.4 10.2 Educational level: very low (%) b 8.7 7.4 7.8 Employment status: Unemployed, recipient of social security or disability benefits. (%) 9.6 10.3 10.6 Income: low (%) c 10.5 14.1 14.4 Family situation: living alone (%) 17.3 17.2 17.8 Geographic area: highly urbanised (%) d 14.9 20.2 20.2 Geographic area: rural (%) e 14.5 10.7 10.7