What’s important when caring for a loved one? Population-based preference weights for the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for informal carers (ASCOT-Carer) for Austria

PURPOSE: The Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit for informal carers (ASCOT-Carer) can be used to assess long-term care-related quality of life (LTC-QoL) of adult informal carers of persons using LTC services. The ASCOT-Carer instrument has been translated into several languages, but preference weights reflecting the relative importance of different outcome states are only available for England so far. In this paper, we estimated preference weights for the German version of the ASCOT-Carer for Austria and investigated the value people place on different QoL-outcome states. METHODS: We used data from a best–worst scaling (BWS) experiment and estimated a scale-adjusted multinomial logit (S-MNL) model to elicit preference weights for the ASCOT-Carer domain-levels. Data were collected using an online survey of the Austrian general population (n = 1001). RESULTS: Top levels in the domains of ‘Space and time to be yourself’, ‘Occupation’ and ‘Control over daily life’ were perceived as providing the highest utility, and states with high needs in the same domains seen as particularly undesirable. ‘Personal safety’ was the only domain where levels were roughly equidistant. In all other domains, the difference between the top two levels (‘ideal state’ and ‘no needs’) was very small. CONCLUSION: The paper provides preference weights for the German version of ASCOT-Carer to be used in Austrian populations. Furthermore, the results give insight into which LTC-QoL-outcomes are seen as particularly (un)desirable, and may therefore help to better tailor services directed at informal carers and the persons they care for.