Question pretext
During the last 12 months, have you experienced the following….
For this set of questions, the interviewer must read out a series of symptoms and determine if the respondent had any of those symptoms in the last 12 months. The point of asking symptom-related questions is to screen those individuals who might have a specific health condition or disease. Because there could be a number of symptoms that characterise a given health condition, and because some symptoms may be common to different conditions, it is important that the interviewer probe for each symptom to see whether the respondent may have an active disease. It is also important that the time
period for the symptoms (in the last 12 months) be clearly understood by the respondent and not confused with other time frames used in this section (such as "ever" and "the last 2 weeks").
Literal question
During the last 12 months, have you had an attack of shortness of breath that came on without obvious cause when you were not exercising or doing some physical activity?
Categories
| Value |
Category |
Cases |
|
| 1 |
Yes |
119 |
|
| 5 |
No |
3788 |
|
| Sysmiss |
|
31 |
|
Warning: these figures indicate the number of cases found in the data file. They cannot be interpreted as summary statistics of the population of interest.
Interviewer instructions
The purpose of this question is to distinguish problems with shortness of breath caused by asthma from other health conditions. It is important that the interviewer focuses on whether the onset of shortness of breath occurred while the person was at rest, without any obvious trigger.
