Compare methods

	Disability Weights Elicitation	Disability Quality of Life Assessment
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Year of origin	2012	2002
Originator	Joshua A. Salomon and the Global Burden of Disease disability weights collaboration	Robert L. Schalock & Miguel Angel Verdugo; World Health Organization (ICF)
Type	Survey-and-estimation pipeline for valuing health states on a 0-1 scale	Measurement methodology for quality of life in disability populations
Seminal source	Salomon, J. A., Vos, T., Hogan, D. R., et al. (2012). Common values in assessing health outcomes from disease and injury: disability weights measurement study for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. The Lancet, 380(9859), 2129-2143.	Schalock, R. L., & Verdugo, M. A. (2002). Handbook on Quality of Life for Human Service Practitioners. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation. ISBN: 9780940898776
Aliases	Health-State Valuation, Disability Weight Estimation, Paired-Comparison Disability Weighting, GBD Disability Weights Method	QOL Measurement in Disability, Health-Related Quality of Life Assessment, Disability HRQOL Methodology, QOL-in-Disability Assessment
Related	3	3
Summary	Disability weights elicitation is the methodology for assigning each health state a number between zero and one that represents the level of health loss it entails, where zero is full health and one is a state equivalent to death. These weights are the ingredient that converts time lived in less-than-full health into the years-lived-with-disability component of summary health metrics, but the technique here is the valuation itself rather than the downstream metric. The dominant modern approach, developed for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 study by Salomon and colleagues, abandoned older clinician-based valuations in favor of large population surveys that ask ordinary people to make simple paired comparisons between described health states. Because such comparisons yield only orderings, the method uses a probit regression to recover a latent severity scale and then anchors that scale to the zero-to-one disability-weight interval. The result is a set of weights grounded in common values held across diverse populations, describing functioning loss in terms compatible with the biopsychosocial view of health embodied in the ICF.	Quality of life assessment in disability populations is the general methodology for measuring how well people with disabilities are living, encompassing both overall quality of life and health-related quality of life. Unlike a single instrument or model, it is a set of methodological commitments and decisions that researchers and practitioners must navigate whenever they attempt such measurement. Drawing on the quality-of-life science consolidated by Schalock and Verdugo and on the biopsychosocial framing of disability in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, the methodology distinguishes objective life conditions from subjective evaluation, weighs generic against condition-specific instruments, and confronts phenomena that are especially acute in disability populations. Chief among these are response shift, the tendency for a person's internal standards to change over time, and the disability paradox, in which people with serious impairments often report a good quality of life that observers would not predict. The methodology also insists on accessible administration and valid proxy reporting so that people who communicate differently are measured fairly rather than excluded.