Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objective: The main purpose of this study is to apply the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach to model the health status in rural and urban society in West Sumatera, Indonesia. Methods: The data set was taken from Primary Health Research that was conducted in the year 2013 in Indonesia. In this study, SEM was applied to 3677 respondents from urban area and 3134 respondents from rural area who lived in West Sumatera, a propince in Indonesia. The survey involved the gathering of information on the respondent’s socio-demography, lifestyles, mental health condition, and biomarkers. Results: After fitting the data to the hypothesis model, this study highlighted that the health status model for urban area and rural area were different. For urban area’s model, socio-demography and mental health condition were found to have a significant direct effect on the health status. However, lifestyle had an indirect effect on the health status, as mediated by the socio-demography. Meanwhile for rural area’s model, this study found that socio-demography, lifestyle and mental health had significant direct effect on the health status. Conclusions: Both proposed model fitted the data well based on the indicators of goodness-of-fit. Thus, this study proved that SEM was pertinent to be applied for constructing the health status on individual.

Keywords: Health Status, Rural Area, Socio-Demography, Structural Equation Modeling, Urban Area