The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of Taiwan's National Health Insurance program (NHI), established in 1995, on improving elderly access to care and health status. Further, we estimate the extent to which NHI reduces gaps in access and health across income groups....

Relationships among socio-demographic characteristics, general assessments of health, and old-age mortality have been well established in developed countries. There is also increasing focus on the connection between early-life experiences and late-life health. This study tests these and other...

We use data from a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of older Taiwanese to examine the relationship between religious involvement--including religious affiliation, religious attendance, beliefs, and religious practices--and self-reported measures of overall health status, mobility...

This paper examines methods of decomposing a difference in levels between groups for a dependent variable such as income. Applied to regression equations, this technique estimates the contribution to the difference from divergent characteristics and divergent rates of converting characteristics...

A recognized problem in mounting longitudinal surveys concerns the costs and difficulties in maintaining response rates over time. This article details the techniques used to minimize response loss in a longitudinal study which maintained an 89% response rate over five interviews covering a...

Problems of maintaining respondent rapport in surveys are exacerbated when respondents are asked to participate repeatedly over time or when several members of a family are interviewed. This article details the techniques used to maintain respondent rapport in a longitudinal study involving six...

Survey methods have been criticized for producing unreliable, invalid data and for failing to provide contextual information to test complex causal hypotheses. We discuss a technique that combines survey and ethnographic methods at every stage of the data collection process to overcome these...