Thanks Ray - appreciate the explanation, although I disagree, on two levels.
First on your last point – that they are opinions. This is the crux of the question in my post. When someone asks this question (in a survey or in conversation), certainly your response is your opinion, but what is your opinion based on? This gets back to the question in the OP: Is there a standard definition of ‘good health’ and how do you handle chronic diseases in making that assessment? @Nancy50 took us through her reasoning to say “very good health”, and everyone has different standards and methods for self-assessing. Someone else with Nancy’s chronic conditions might say average or even poor health, using a different rationale. So any question like this is pretty flawed for drawing any averages because people ground their opinions differently.
It’s not a rare question by any means, and comes up in many contexts. As I mentioned earlier, my wife was asked this question and some even stranger variants in a required medical questionnaire, so clearly someone believes there is some clinical value in the answer. I think every routine doctor’s appointment has some version of the “how’s your health” question. Of course in that context you can elaborate rather than simply checking a box.
Second, I believe the opinion is actionable. If you tell the doctor you are in poor health, she will try to understand why and provide a course of action to help you move from poor health to better health. So in that way it is actionable.
A subtext here relates to the appropriateness of the question in the context of a college reunion, and this one raises even more possibilities. Several posters (you as well as @John58 i believe) would answer the question less than honestly. Just say your health is excellent and move on.
Why do that? This is a confidential questionnaire - no one will see your response. In that way, your individual response has no affect on you, but the distribution of (accurate) reponses might be interesting to your college cohort.
In my context, the reunion questionnaire is a particular tradition for my class. The same person has done it for 35 years, and he also provides a readout of responses during a very popular campus session for our class during reunion. He also asks questions like: “Have you had an extramarital affair?” and “How often do you have sex?” so the question about rating your health is mild in this context. Over the years we’ve had plenty of people get upset with the questions - they don’t have to fill out the survey.
Of course, if people fill it out insincerely, and everyone is misleading everyone else in their responses, it will be very confusing - like that old Garrison Keillor bit about Lake Wobegone: “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”. In my 40th college reunion, everyone is in great health, at least they all think so. Maybe that will happen - I’ll let you know after reunion.
(btw, my AI tells me that this is an actual psychological phenomenon called the “lake wobegone effect” where there is a “human tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities”.)
Have I beaten my dead horse enough? Happy to go another round if you like.
