| dc.description.abstract | Access to medical care is an important factor in predicting health outcomes. Specifically, the geographic and spatial measures used to proxy for access can play an important role in how social science researchers understand health as a byproduct of healthcare access. Within existing literature, the operationalizations of geographic access vary and the effects of geographic access on health are unclear. Specifically, researchers often use distance-to-practitioner and time-to-practitioner as proxies for the same geographic access concept. However, the difference in what these measures capture—as well as the potential impact of this difference on health outcomes— has not yet been explicated using a singular data set. Additionally, researchers often used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) measures of time and distance to care, which may not capture important factors such as individuals’ actual providers versus those nearest to an individual’s residence. For this reason, I discuss the potential theoretical and methodological benefits of self-reported measures of time and distance. I use data from the 2017 Health Reform Monitoring Survey to compare the predictive power of self-reported time and distance to care measures on health. I find that time and distance factors provide comparable estimates of access, but that distance may be advantageous for model fit and theoretical utility in healthcare access research. | |
