Joshi Anushree, Panchamia Jallavi, Mavalankar Dileep
Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavioural Science, Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, IND.
Cureus. 2024 Dec 20;16(12):e76073. doi: 10.7759/cureus.76073. eCollection 2024 Dec.
Understanding the preferences of specialist physicians is essential to mitigate their critical deficiency in the Indian rural healthcare system. This necessitates an urgent focus to inform health policy interventions imperative to address and strengthen the vacancies of specialist physicians in the Indian rural healthcare system. The policy interventions should address the preferences of specialists, leading to their intention to stay in rural postings. The paper aims to develop a questionnaire to assess specialist physicians' preferences for rural postings using a discrete choice experiment (DCE).
A DCE is a widely utilized quantitative approach to understanding health workers' preferences, positing that individuals make trade-offs while selecting an alternative product or service that provides the most utility. This paper comprehensively explains the stages of developing the DCE questionnaire, which involves creating choice sets using various experimental designs to ascertain specialist physicians' preferences for rural postings.
The choice sets for the specified attributes and levels in the study were generated by mathematically combining hypothetical job scenarios using diverse experimental designs. The study employed a pairwise design for the mathematical combination of hypothetical job scenarios, yielding 90 unique choice sets with an equal likelihood of involvement across each of the six blocks. Consequently, each of the six blocks contained 15 distinct choice sets, administered to participants as six DCE questionnaire versions.
This paper outlines the creation of a DCE questionnaire aimed at elucidating the incentive preferences of specialist physicians in rural Rajasthan. It describes the development of diverse experimental designs and the creation of choice sets for the questionnaire's formulation. The objective is to offer a comprehensive guide for novice researchers, doctoral scholars, and health practitioners, imparting information and comprehending the intricacies involved in DCE questionnaire design, even if they are new to this research methodology.
了解专科医生的偏好对于缓解印度农村医疗系统中他们严重短缺的问题至关重要。这就需要迫切关注，以便为卫生政策干预提供信息，这些干预对于解决和加强印度农村医疗系统中专科医生的空缺至关重要。政策干预应考虑专科医生的偏好，从而促使他们愿意留在农村岗位。本文旨在开发一份问卷，通过离散选择实验（DCE）来评估专科医生对农村岗位的偏好。
DCE是一种广泛使用的定量方法，用于了解卫生工作者的偏好，它假定个体在选择能提供最大效用的替代产品或服务时会进行权衡。本文全面解释了开发DCE问卷的各个阶段，其中包括使用各种实验设计创建选择集，以确定专科医生对农村岗位的偏好。
通过使用不同的实验设计对假设的工作场景进行数学组合，生成了研究中指定属性和水平的选择集。该研究采用成对设计对假设的工作场景进行数学组合，产生了90个独特的选择集，在六个组块中的每一个组块中被选中的可能性相同。因此，六个组块中的每一个都包含15个不同的选择集，作为六个DCE问卷版本提供给参与者。
本文概述了一份旨在阐明拉贾斯坦邦农村地区专科医生激励偏好的DCE问卷的创建过程。它描述了多种实验设计的开发以及为问卷制定而创建的选择集。目的是为新手研究人员、博士学者和卫生从业者提供一份全面的指南，传授信息并帮助他们理解DCE问卷设计中涉及的复杂性，即使他们对这种研究方法不熟悉。
