Understanding and Predicting Choice Behaviour in Health: Preference Elicitation and Analysis
COURSE DATES
Monday 12 - Wednesday 14 May 2025
Hybrid: in-person and online. A combination of lectures and practical sessions on choice models and experimental designs over three days. We strongly recommend in-person attendance where possible.
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overview
Researchers need to understand decision-making in a range of health settings: for example, what drives smokers to choose cigarettes or e-cigarettes? What is a realistic non-inferiority margin to use in a clinical trial? How does society value different aspects of quality of life? What drives individuals to take, or refuse, vaccines? Why do people prefer drug A to drug B?
This course covers methods for understanding how choice making is analysed in health care to assess preferences, analyse policies, help to develop randomised controlled trials, conduct non-market valuation, and forecast behaviour. This course teaches introductory methods for devising experiments and modelling choice data in health care.
WHo is this course for?
The course is for those who need to perform discrete choice analysis in healthcare and those who need to understand the issues that health researchers face when performing these analyses. This could include researchers and decision makers from public, commercial, and academic organisations concerned with understanding health preferences. We welcome participants from a wide variety of backgrounds and from around the world.
There are no formal prerequisites for attendance, but participants should have some understanding of basic statistics and regression techniques, including logistic regression and multinomial logistic regression. Choice modelling will be conducted using R (using the Apollo package for choice models), and some familiarity with R software is advised. Ngene software will be used for experimental design, though no prior experience is required and alternatives are available.
If you are unsure whether the course is suitable for you, please email john.buckell who will be happy to advise.
course content
The course will cover:
- an introduction to choice models, data types, and analysing preferences in health;
- model specification, estimation, post-estimation analyses, graphing outputs, and interpretation;
- experimental design and case studies in health;
- heterogeneity: deterministic tastes, random tastes, and attitudes;
- forecasting choice behaviour.
As with past courses, the schedule/content may be altered in response to class participants' questions and needs. We encourage questions and discussion of participants' applications.
teaching team
- Stephane Hess (Director of Choice Modelling Centre and Professor of Choice Modelling at the University of Leeds.)
- John Buckell (Senior research fellow in health economics at the Health Economics Research Centre, University of Oxford.)
- Thomas Hancock (Research Fellow at CMC, University of Leeds and Health Economics Research Centre, University of Oxford.)
learning OUTCOMES
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- understand the research landscape of discrete choice analyses in health care;
- understand the theory and application of discrete choice experiments in health care;
- design discrete choice experiments in health care;
- understand the theory and application of discrete choice models in health care;
- estimate a wide range of choice models in health care;
- predict choices in health care using choice models;
- visualise and interpret results from choice models.
For enquiries, please email the HERC Administration team, or complete this online form to be added to a waiting list for future courses.