China national health attitudes survey 2012-13

This is a nationwide survey of adults in mainland China that explored attitudes towards health care, including how people evaluate their health system and their trust in doctors and health care providers. It also includes data on respondents’ health-related behaviours and utilization of preventive and other health services, as well as trust in political institutions, cultural values, economic status, social capital and standard demographic variables.

This interdisciplinary project establishes a new collaboration among UK researchers and a leading Chinese social research team, to conduct the first major study of Chinese people's attitudes towards their health care. The project's core theoretical contribution is to understanding the relationships between attitudes and health-related behaviours, focussing particularly on how people evaluate their health system, their trust in doctors and the health system, and their utilization of preventive and curative health services. Previous quantitative research on health in China has examined the influence on utilization of age and gender, incomes, insurance protection, distance to health service providers and perceived health care needs. Yet work done in other countries has shown that attitudes, including performance evaluations and trust, can impact on people's decisions about when and where to use health services. At the same time, qualitative studies in China have suggested that people are often critical of performance and that there is a crisis of trust in doctors and the health care system. Our project is the first systematic study of these attitudes and how they influence utilization.

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