Decision‐making in home care package spending

Abstract

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The decision‐making processes and preferences of older Australians purchasing home support services: An explorative inquiry using a “think‐aloud” technique

“…Other research has described that information (provided online) about home care packages is difficult to access and understand, and does not seem to enable independent decision making about how and what services to choose (Phillipson et al, 2019). Rowland and Joyce (2020) have also discussed how some consumers wish to free-up services for people who may need them more or save their funds for a rainy day (as was also discussed by some participants in our study).…”

Heuristics, Biases, and Decisions in Resource Allocation for Home Care Packages under Consumer Directed Care: A Systematic Review and Thematic Synthesis

“…Ten of the eleven papers reference the complexity of decision making [13,15,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30]32]. Factors that complicate decision making in older age are numerous, including time, trade-ofs, information quality, the number of decisions being made, and the number of choice options within those decisions [13,25,26,28].…”

“…Tere is an inherent assumption that decision making is a static and rational process that lends itself to economic models, i.e., when a person makes a decision, the judgement is fnal and the individual will consistently choose in line with that judgement [31]. Models of decision making often assume that associated strategies are homogenous and consistent over the life course [24,31] and that rational choice will reliably lead to optimal allocation of resources [26,28], provided the consumer is fully aware of all possible constraints and outcomes [13,15,30] and is able to process available information [28]. In reality, these assumptions do not hold [28,31].…”

“…Another prevalent assumption is that decision-making strategies remain fxed, i.e., that a person will make a decision in the same way when they are 20 as they will when they are 60 [31]. Evidence presented in ten of the articles suggests this is not the case, indicating that age-related changes in decision making are measurable and that the overall efect is a decline in decision quality [13,15,[24][25][26][27][28][30][31][32]. Te reasons for this decline are generally related to cognitive function [13,15,24,28,31,32], including decreases in processing speed [24,31], executive function [24], and working memory.…”

“…Altered patterns in decision making need to be accounted for, acknowledging that older people are more inclined toward heuristic thinking than younger people [24]. General patterns suggest that older people require more time to process information [24], are more inclined to make decisions emotionally rather than factually (i.e., the afect heuristic) [13,15,24,25,30,32], and will make decisions based on what is familiar to them (i.e., the availability heuristic) [13,15,[24][25][26]28]. It is therefore important for decisions to be framed in meaningful, relevant ways [24].…”