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Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices

BACKGROUND: It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and specifically on major disease areas such as cancer. Our aim was to elicit the views of the general public in the United Kingdom about how a change in gov...

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Autores principales: Shah, Koonal Kirit, Sussex, Jon, Hernandez-Villafuerte, Karla
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4559208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26335693
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12961-015-0027-6
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author Shah, Koonal Kirit
Sussex, Jon
Hernandez-Villafuerte, Karla
author_facet Shah, Koonal Kirit
Sussex, Jon
Hernandez-Villafuerte, Karla
author_sort Shah, Koonal Kirit
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and specifically on major disease areas such as cancer. Our aim was to elicit the views of the general public in the United Kingdom about how a change in government spending on cancer research might affect their willingness to donate, or to hypothecate a portion of their income tax payments, to cancer research charities. METHODS: A web-based stated preference survey was conducted in 2013. Respondents considered hypothetical scenarios regarding changes in the levels of government funding for medical research. In each scenario, respondents were asked to imagine that they could allocate £100 of the income tax they paid this year to one or more medical research charities. They were asked how they wished to allocate the £100 between cancer research charities and medical research charities concerned with diseases other than cancer. After having been given the opportunity to allocate £100 in this way, respondents were then asked if they would want to reduce or increase any personal out-of-pocket donations that they already make to cancer research and non-cancer medical research charities. Descriptive analyses and random effects modelling were used to examine patterns in the response data. RESULTS: The general tendency of respondents was to act to offset hypothetical changes in government spending. When asked to imagine that the government had reduced (or increased) its spending on cancer research, the general tendency of respondents was to state that they would give a larger (or smaller) allocation of their income tax to cancer research charities, and to increase (or reduce) their personal out-of-pocket donations to cancer research charities. However, most respondents’ preferred allocation splits and changes in personal donations did not vary much from scenario to scenario. Many of the differences between scenarios were small and non-significant. CONCLUSIONS: The public’s decisions about how much to donate to cancer research or other medical research charities are not greatly affected by (hypothetical) changes to government plans about the amount of public funding of cancer or other medical research.
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spelling pubmed-45592082015-09-04 Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices Shah, Koonal Kirit Sussex, Jon Hernandez-Villafuerte, Karla Health Res Policy Syst Research BACKGROUND: It is unclear how the public would respond to changes in government decisions about how much to spend on medical research in total and specifically on major disease areas such as cancer. Our aim was to elicit the views of the general public in the United Kingdom about how a change in government spending on cancer research might affect their willingness to donate, or to hypothecate a portion of their income tax payments, to cancer research charities. METHODS: A web-based stated preference survey was conducted in 2013. Respondents considered hypothetical scenarios regarding changes in the levels of government funding for medical research. In each scenario, respondents were asked to imagine that they could allocate £100 of the income tax they paid this year to one or more medical research charities. They were asked how they wished to allocate the £100 between cancer research charities and medical research charities concerned with diseases other than cancer. After having been given the opportunity to allocate £100 in this way, respondents were then asked if they would want to reduce or increase any personal out-of-pocket donations that they already make to cancer research and non-cancer medical research charities. Descriptive analyses and random effects modelling were used to examine patterns in the response data. RESULTS: The general tendency of respondents was to act to offset hypothetical changes in government spending. When asked to imagine that the government had reduced (or increased) its spending on cancer research, the general tendency of respondents was to state that they would give a larger (or smaller) allocation of their income tax to cancer research charities, and to increase (or reduce) their personal out-of-pocket donations to cancer research charities. However, most respondents’ preferred allocation splits and changes in personal donations did not vary much from scenario to scenario. Many of the differences between scenarios were small and non-significant. CONCLUSIONS: The public’s decisions about how much to donate to cancer research or other medical research charities are not greatly affected by (hypothetical) changes to government plans about the amount of public funding of cancer or other medical research. BioMed Central 2015-09-03 /pmc/articles/PMC4559208/ /pubmed/26335693 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12961-015-0027-6 Text en © Shah et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Shah, Koonal Kirit
Sussex, Jon
Hernandez-Villafuerte, Karla
Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title_full Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title_fullStr Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title_full_unstemmed Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title_short Government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
title_sort government and charity funding of cancer research: public preferences and choices
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4559208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26335693
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12961-015-0027-6
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