Attitudes Toward Quality of Survival

Heather J. Sutherland, Hilary Llewellyn-Thomas, Norman F. Boyd and James E. Till

Medical Decision Making, 1982, vol. 2, issue 3, 299-309

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes toward the duration of survival in different health states. Health professionals were asked to consider hypothetical situ ations in which a specified period of time would be spent in a defined health state. Preferences for these different situations were assessed using two methods—a Pref erence Questionnaire and a Certainty Equivalence method. The results obtained indicated that attitudes toward duration of survival depended strongly on the amount of time to be spent in a hypothetical health state, and on the quality of the state. As the duration of survival increased, or the state under consideration became more dysfunctional, a higher proportion of raters expressed a preference for imme diate death over further survival in the dysfunctional state. These results contradict the view that time preference curves always increase monotonically, independent of the quality of survival. Instead, subjects appeared to identify a variable, the "maxi mal endurable time" in a given state. When this time was exceeded, attitudes toward additional increments of survival changed dramatically. (Med Decis Making 2:299-309, 1982)

Date: 1982
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X8200200306 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:2:y:1982:i:3:p:299-309

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X8200200306

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().