Understanding the non-stationary associations between distrust of the health care system, health conditions, and self-rated health in the elderly: a geographically weighted regression approach.

The goals of this study are to explore whether health condition is an antecedent extraneous factor for the relationship between health care system distrust and self-rated health among the elderly, and to investigate if the associations among these variables are place-specific. We used logistic geographically weighted regression to analyze data on an elderly sample residents in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. We found that the health conditions of the elderly account for the association between high distrust and poor/fair self-rated health and that the distrust/self-rated health relationship varied spatially. This finding suggests that a place-centered perspective can inform distrust/self-rated health research.