Health services utilization among older adults: conceptual, measurement, and modeling issues in secondary analysis.

Much is written about the use of health services by older adults. Many such studies involve secondary analyses of existing data sources and rely on the behavioral model of health services utilization as the conceptual framework. This essay suggests that for both independent and dependent variables, severe shortcomings in the breadth and depth of the available data, and the numbers of intervals at which data have been recorded, continue to limit our understanding of the use of health services by older adults.