Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N Wolfe Street, Office, Baltimore, MD, 5032, 21205, USA.
Department of Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, 220 Lincoln Tower, 1800 Cannon Drive, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
BMC Public Health. 2024 Sep 27;24(1):2607. doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-20068-w.
Stakeholder engagement in policy decision-making is critical to inform required trade-offs, especially in low-and-middle income settings, such as many African countries. Discrete-choice experiments are now commonly used to engage stakeholders in policy decisions, but other methods such as best-worst scaling (BWS), a theory-driven prioritization technique, could be equally important. We sought to document and explore applications of BWS to assess stakeholder priorities in the African context to bring attention to BWS as a method and to assess how and why it is being used to inform policy.
We conducted a literature review of published applications of BWS for prioritization in Africa.
Our study identified 35 studies, with the majority published in the past four years. BWS has most commonly been used in agriculture (43%) and health (34%), although its broad applicability is demonstrated through use in fields influencing social and economic determinants of health, including business, environment, and transportation. Published studies from eastern, western, southern, and northern Africa include a broad range of sample sizes, design choices, and analytical approaches. Most studies are of high quality and high policy relevance. Several studies cited benefits of using BWS, with many of those citing potential limitations rather than observed limitations in their study.
Growing use of the method across the African continent demonstrates its feasibility and utility, recommending it for consideration among researchers, program implementers, policy makers, and funders when conducting preference research to influence policy and improve health systems.
The review was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42020209745).
利益相关者参与政策决策对于告知所需的权衡至关重要，尤其是在中低收入环境中，如许多非洲国家。离散选择实验现在常用于让利益相关者参与政策决策，但其他方法，如最佳最差缩放法（BWS），一种基于理论的优先级确定技术，也可能同样重要。我们旨在记录和探讨 BWS 在评估非洲背景下利益相关者优先级方面的应用，以引起对 BWS 作为一种方法的关注，并评估其被用于为政策提供信息的方式和原因。
我们对在非洲进行的 BWS 优先排序的已发表应用进行了文献回顾。
我们的研究确定了 35 项研究，其中大多数发表于过去四年。BWS 最常用于农业（43%）和卫生（34%）领域，尽管其广泛适用性通过在影响健康的社会和经济决定因素的领域中的应用得以证明，包括商业、环境和交通领域。来自东部、西部、南部和北部非洲的已发表研究包括广泛的样本量、设计选择和分析方法。大多数研究的质量都很高，对政策的相关性也很强。有几项研究提到了使用 BWS 的好处，其中许多研究提到了潜在的局限性，而不是在其研究中观察到的局限性。
该方法在非洲大陆的广泛应用证明了其可行性和实用性，建议研究人员、方案实施者、政策制定者和资助者在进行偏好研究以影响政策和改善卫生系统时考虑使用该方法。
该综述已在 PROSPERO（CRD42020209745）上注册。
