DOI: 10.3886/e159261v1
title: Data and Code for: What’s Behind Her Smile? Health, Looks, and Self-Esteem

description: These files contain the program and data for the article "What’s Behind Her Smile? Health, Looks, and Self-Esteem".<br> The article examines how improving dental health affects economic, social, and psychological outcomes. In a randomized experiment, we provide a low-income group in Chile free dental care, including prostheses, and find significant and persistent impacts on men's and women's dental and self-perceived mental health. For women, treatment generates steady improvement in self-esteem, significant impact on appearance, short-run improvements in employment and earnings, and improvement in partner interactions. We find no impact for men in any of these dimensions. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that treatment effects on labor market outcomes are larger for women with more severe visible dental issues at baseline. In summary, we find that increasing access to dental care, including cosmetic elements, improves important aspects of people's lives.<br>
description: Response Rates: Baseline survey: All 799 subjects who participated in the RCT answered the survey. <br><br>First follow up survey: 642 people participated in this survey, corresponding to 80.4% of the original sample.<br><br>Second follow up survey: 547 people participated in this survey, corresponding to 68.5% of the original sample.
description: Presence of Common Scales: The dataset includes data for several dimensions related to health, economic, psychological, and social outcomes. All the variables are labeled in the dataset and explained in the paper. We highlight light here three well known scales collected as part of this project. <br><br>The Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP) . To measure oral health-related quality oflife, each participant answered the 14 questions of the Oral Health Impact Profile(OHIP-14) developed by Slade (1997), translated into Spanish. The instrument collects information on seven dimensions: functional limitations, physical pain,psychological discomfort, physical disability, psychological disability, social disability,and handicaps. Each question is answered on a Likert scale basis. Scoresrange between 0 and 56.<br><br>The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Test. To measure self-esteem, we use the Rosenbergself-esteem test (Rosenberg, 1965). It consists of 10 statements on overall feelings of self-worth evaluated on a four-point Likert scale. Scores range between 0 and 30; a higher measure indicates higher overall self-esteem. We use the Spanish version validated for Chilean adults by Rojas-Barahona et al. (2009).<br><br>The SF-12 questionnaire (Ware et al., 1996). The instrument evaluates the impact of health on everyday life summarized into two components: physical and mental health. The score ranges from 0 to 100, where a higher score implies a better health-related quality of life. The physical health index includes physical functioning, bodily pain, general health perception, and role-health (heath issues interfering with work and activities). In turn, the mental health index considers energy and vitality,social functioning, role-emotional (emotional issues limiting work and activities), and mental health perception.
description: The sample was constructed with the elegible people who applied for the dental treatment offered for this study.
description: Subjects who applied for the dental health tratment offered. All of them live in the Santiago region in Chile.
description: on-site questionnaire;