Sex, Illness, Illness Behavior, and the Use of Health Services

Abstract

Many investigators of the sex differences in health confound conception with reporting, illness with illness behavior, and symptoms with disability. There is also a tendency to confuse subjects' responses, those attributable to the selective process through which men and women appear at varying sources of help, and those due to the attitudes and the behavior of health personnel. This paper considers a group of alternative hypotheses that attempt to account for sex differences in health. Existing data suggest that women seem to report many more subjective symptoms than men. Also, much of the excess chronic illness reported by women is in part a reflection of how they define and respond to illness and to their life situations. There is a need for developing research designs that test alternative conceptions of the sex differences in health more rigorously.