Using Surveys to Calculate Disability-Adjusted Life-Years

Mapping a certain disease into a system of disabling attributes allows researchers to compare diseases within a common framework. To quantify the total burden of morbidity (e.g., morbidity attributable to alcohol use), so-called disability weights (DWs) must be generated. General-population surveys can be used to derive DWs from health valuation tasks. This article describes the application of three psychometric methods (i.e., pairwise comparisons, ranking tasks, and visual analog scales) in general-population surveys and outlines their strengths and weaknesses. A recently proposed health valuation framework also is presented, which highlights the underlying cognitive processes from a social-judgment perspective and presents a structured data-collection procedure that seems promising in deriving DWs from general-population surveys.