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A ‘new and improved’ EQ-5D valuation questionnaire?

Results from a pilot study

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Abstract

Notwithstanding its widespread use, the standard questionnaire used to elicit visual analogue scale valuations for EQ-5D states is well known to suffer from problems with missing values (particularly for the state ‘dead’) and logical inconsistencies. This contribution reports on efforts to redesign the questionnaire to overcome these problems and the results from its use in a pilot study. The redesigned questionnaire asks respondents to provide a numerical score for each state (instead of drawing lines to a visual analogue scale) and employs a new method for valuing ‘dead’. A pilot study was undertaken to gauge the effects of these innovations, over and above other cosmetic changes to the questionnaire. The redesigned questionnaire was found to result in fewer missing values, fewer exclusions and fewer logical inconsistencies. Mean re-scaled values for the health states remained virtually identical. The results suggest that scoring is a better way of eliciting self-completed valuations than scaling.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the persons who completed the questionnaires. We also thank Richard Brooks, Paul Kind, David Parkin and Alan Williams for their comments and suggestions on the prototype questionnaire, and other members of the EuroQol Group for comments on an earlier version of this paper presented to the 19th Scientific Meeting of the EuroQol Group, University of York, 2002. The survey reported in this study was funded by a grant from the EuroQol Foundation, 2002. The design and data collection phases were undertaken while Nancy Devlin was employed by the King’s Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. City Health Economics Centre, City University, London, UK

    Nancy Devlin

  2. Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Paul Hansen

  3. Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Peter Herbison

  4. Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York, UK

    Susan Macran

  5. City Health Economics Centre, Department of Economics, City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1VOHB, UK

    Nancy Devlin

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  1. Nancy Devlin
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  2. Paul Hansen
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  3. Peter Herbison
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  4. Susan Macran
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Correspondence to Nancy Devlin.

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Devlin, N., Hansen, P., Herbison, P. et al. A ‘new and improved’ EQ-5D valuation questionnaire?. Eur J Health Econ 6, 73–82 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-004-0263-0

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