Initiating Transformative Change By Capturing Stakeholder Preferences with Discrete Choice Experiments

Background and Purpose

This year's Call for Papers demands transformative change of a racially unjust society through forward-thinking research, improved measurement of community needs, better alignment of research with policy and practice, and improved insights for policymakers. The first logical step of this desired social transformation is to capture effectively the preferences of diverse stakeholders. Yet, social work lacks a standardized methodology for preference studies. The discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a critically important preference assessment methodology that could dramatically improve social work research, including community-based participatory research. DCEs can also help researchers engage with stakeholders in formulating research questions, defining intervention and comparator conditions, selecting study outcomes, and designing interventions, programs, and policies. The purpose of this workshop is to extend this valuable tool to social work researchers.

DCEs are common in marketing, where they first emerged, and are increasingly popular for measuring healthcare preferences. In a DCE, each respondent completes several choice tasks. A choice task is a hypothetical situation in which the participant is presented with alternatives and selects one or more of those alternatives. For example, in social work, a choice task might involve choosing among social policies or between two interventions with different attributes (e.g., service location, provider type, service hours, cost, childcare availability, individual versus group format). Researchers analyze DCE data to estimate the value to stakeholders of different attributes (e.g., service location versus provider type) and attribute levels (e.g., seeing a social worker versus a medical provider). DCE findings can describe stakeholder perceptions about trade-offs, assign monetary value to alternatives, and predict uptake of new policies or interventions. Including diverse participants and measuring participant characteristics allows DCE researchers to understand the preferences of diverse stakeholders. DCEs are quantitative, but high-quality DCEs incorporate mixed methods.

We will introduce participants to DCEs, explain how to design and conduct a DCE, walk through a worked example, and engage participants in developing social work applications.

Workshop Content

This workshop will cover the following topics:

1. Introduction to DCEs

2. Best-practice guidelines for DCEs, from design through analysis

3. A worked example involving caregiver preferences for ADHD treatment

4. Recent advances in DCE design and analysis

5. Social work applications

We will also provide resources for further learning.

Pedagogy

Based on research evidence, we will promote learning through participant engagement, connection with previous knowledge, and rehearsal of content. We will engage with participants through frequent questions and small-group exercises. For example, we will begin by conducting a brief DCE with participants as a demonstration. We will use pairs or small groups to help participants connect the unique features of DCE design and the DCE best-practice guidelines to what they already know. We will present concrete examples of social work applications, allowing time for questions, then ask participants to form interest groups and develop initial plans for their own DCEs. Our slide presentation will use practices known to focus attention and enhance retention, such as minimizing slide content and using size and contrast to highlight the most important content.