United States stakeholders advised including adolescents in the valuation study for the EQ-5D-Y-3L, a step towards greater acknowledgement of children in informing societal values. This study aimed to assess the relative contribution of adolescent and adult preferences to a model when combined. Discrete choice experiment (DCE) data were collected from an online sample of 1,529 adults and 714 adolescents (ages 11-17). Each respondent completed 15 DCE tasks which were analyzed using latent class models representing varying number of preference classes. Within the best-fitting model, the contribution of each class was determined by the 'scale-adjusted class share' (SACS), combining the class's proportion of respondents (class share) and the magnitude of coefficients (within-class scale). We estimated the contribution of adolescent and adult respondents to SACS for each class, with lower SACS representing less contribution to the combined model. The best fitting model described 6 classes. Adults had higher contribution to all except one class, accounting for 78.7% of the total contribution. After adjusting for the unequal sample size of adolescent and adult respondents, adults contributed approximately 65.0% and adolescents contributed 35.0% of the weights towards a combined model. Adolescents showed diminished, disproportionate representation in a combined model, due in part to more indifferent, less informative preferences for EQ-5D-Y-3L health states compared to adults. Latent class analysis showcases one approach to estimate and weight contributions from intentionally sampled subgroups in a combined model.
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