Disability Weights Elicitation

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.