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Presentation

Session: Employing Utility Measures
Room: Ball Room
Time: Thu 14:30-15:45

Presenter: Marj Moodie (Deakin University. Public Health Research Evaluation and Policy Cluster)

Abstract

The Pacific OPIC Project is a community-based intervention project in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga designed to increase the capacity of the Pacific region to respond to the obesity crisis. The linked economic studies included the administration of the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL-6D) instrument to facilitate description of the quality of life burden of adolescent overweight and obesity and as an outcome measure in a cost-utility analysis of the interventions. This required recalibration of the utility weights which were based on Australian adult health preferences to those for adolescents on a country-specific basis. As in the original development of the instrument, the time trade-off methodology was employed to elicit health state preferences. Thirty multi-attribute health states were generated from the AQoL-6D descriptive system with each participant required to complete a set of 10. The time trade-off interviews were conducted in a group setting in the classroom with senior secondary students. Twenty-four groups (6 per country) involving 279 students across the four countries completed 2,790 scenarios. The TTO scores were econometrically transformed by regressing the TTO scores upon predicted scores from the AQoL-6D to produce country-specific algorithms which incorporated country-specific “corrections” to the Australian adult utility weights in the original AQoL. This study is unique for two methodological elements, which to our knowledge, have not been previously reported in the academic literature. The first is the econometric modification of an extant multi-attribute utility instrument to accommodate cultural and other group-specific differences in preferences. The second is the use of the TTO technique with adolescents in a classroom group setting. Significant differences in utility scores were found between the four countries. Statistical results indicate that the AQoL-6D can be validly used in the economic evaluation of both the OPIC interventions and other adolescent programs.

Key Terms

Authors:

Marj Moodie , Jeff Richardson , Angelo Iezzi , Boyd Swinburn and Kompal Sinha

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