Roger Brice

Preferences of older people for environmental attributes of local parks: The use of choice‐based conjoint analysis

Purpose – This study aims to examine the environmental attributes relevant to older peoples preferences for neighbourhood open spaces. It also aims to explore the association between the relative importance of different environmental attributes and personal and social characteristics in a sample of older people covering a range of geographic locations in the UK.Design/methodology/approach – Choice‐based conjoint analysis (CBC) was used to obtain responses from a sample of 237 older people (60 years +) living in the UK. A total of 13 environmental attributes were identified from earlier qualitative and quantitative studies. Participants were asked to choose a preferred park from a pair of hypothetical neighbourhood parks differing on four of the attributes presented in a questionnaire. The questionnaire included 14 such tasks.Findings – The results suggest that older people preferred a neighbourhood park which is without nuisance, has cafes and toilets, many trees and plants, light traffic en route, wildl...

Conjoint Analysis of French and German Parents’ Willingness to Pay for Meningococcal Vaccine

Objective:To estimate the willingness of parents in France and Germany to pay for meningococcal conjugate vaccines for their teenage children.Methods:A conjoint analysis survey was administered to parents who had received counselling on the nature and risks of meningococcal disease in young people. In each country, half were randomly assigned to view a video with graphical depictions of the effects of meningococcaemia. Subjects were then shown a series of 18 sets of three vaccine descriptions. Each description listed the price of a hypothetical vaccine (range €15–304; 2001 values), the duration of protection, and the number of serogroups of the bacteria covered. The survey asked which vaccine they preferred and whether they would buy it. Conditional logit and generalised linear-random effects logit models assessed the effect of product attributes, personal background and video viewership on the probability of indicating a purchase.Results:92.6% of subjects would purchase at least one of the vaccines they encountered. Price elasticity ranged from -1.20 (France) to -2.48 (Germany). Exposure to graphical depictions of disease consequences negligibly increased the overall willingness to purchase vaccine in French participants, but lowered the overall willingness in German participants.Conclusion:In Germany and France, where there is still limited out-of-pocket health spending, the majority of sampled respondents stated that they would purchase meningococcal vaccines with their own money.

Quality of Life in Patients with Glaucoma: A Conjoint Analysis Approach

Purpose: To assess the perceived importance of visual field loss on vision-related quality of life for a group of patients with glaucoma. Methods: A group of 108 subjects with glaucoma and visual acuity better than 20/40 were given a battery of tests including clinical assessment, visual function measures, and quality of life questionnaires. Within the latter was a choice-based conjoint analysis which is a way of estimating patient utilities (i.e., values or part-worths) associated with different visual outcomes. Five attribute outcomes from a principal component analysis of the National Eye Institute-Visual Functioning Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ) were presented for conjoint analysis at three different levels of difficulty; these were central and near vision, peripheral vision, darkness and glare, household chores, and outdoor mobility. Results: Subjects rated peripheral visual loss and its associated behavioural problems as less important than tasks associated with central vision and outdoor mobility. While ...