Commentary: Using Stated Preference Discrete Choice Experiments to Elicit Women’s Preferences for Aspects of Maternity Care

Abstract

Recent years have seen a welcome growth in the number of stated preference discrete choice experiments (SPDCEs) aimed at eliciting individual or community preferences for health interventions or aspects of health care (1). The technique is based on the premise that any ‘‘good,’’ in health care any intervention, drug therapy, treatment, or aspect of care, for example, can be described by its attributes (or characteristics) and that the extent to which an individual values a ‘‘good’’ depends on the explicit tradeoffs between these attributes. Alternative configurations of the attributes might describe the impact of the intervention or aspect of care on health outcomes, but might also describe nonhealth outcomes or the process by which the intervention or aspect of care is delivered. The technique also allows for the generation of marginal rates of substitution between the attributes, that is, the degree to which respondents are willing to trade one attribute for another. Indeed, if ‘‘cost’’ is included as an attribute, then marginal willingness-to-pay values can be inferred for changes in the levels of the remaining attributes. The results of such SPDCEs can then be used directly within cost benefit analyses (2).