Decision research strategies.

Abstract

Cancer poses many, often difficult choices. Studying these choices poses several strategic decisions for researchers, including (a) whether to conduct formal analyses of the choices being studied, (b) whether to adopt a persuasive stance (or only facilitate independent decision making), (c) whether to focus on optimizing specific choices or securing broader mastery, and (d) which individual differences to address. Behavioral decision research's strategic approach is demonstrated in 4 contexts relevant to cancer-related decisions: (a) informed consent, (b) prevention, (c) infectious disease, and (d) medical emergencies. Each example contains interacting elements of normative analysis, identifying optimal choices; descriptive research, characterizing actual behavior; and prescriptive interventions, seeking to bridge the gap between the normative ideal and the descriptive reality.

The loss of reason in patient decision aid research: Do checklists damage the quality of informed choice interventions?

“…Proficiency across these areas is unlikely to be mastered by a single person or research team and synthesising systematically the evidence in this paper is unrealistic. However, a shared understanding of the goals, professional philosophies and pertinence of each of these areas to our own is necessary if patient decision aids fit for purpose are to be developed [36,37].…”

“…The focus of IPDAS dissemination activities has been to increase awareness of patient decision aids' efficacy to enhance the shared decision making or patient-centred practices of professionals and provide detailed steps on how do it [4][5][6]9,10,19,[30][31][32][33][34][35]. This article aims to provide a knowledge brokering of concepts [37] to help reduce the knowledge-action gap between health professionals and behavioural scientists, and enable patient decision aid developers to reason critically about their operationalisation of the IPDAS checklist. It discusses concepts from both the social sciences and health services delivery of relevance to patient decision aid interventions and evaluation with references to the evidence and theories that underpin this synthesis.…”

“…Decision scientists have spent decades investigating the processes by which people make decisions and the quality of those decisions (see [27,37,43,64,65,[86][87][88]). There is debate amongst decision scientists about how to define a good decision that reflects their beliefs about people's decision making (see [27,37,49,50]).…”

Analyzing disaster risks and plans: An avian flu example

“…Doing so for every individual and decision would quickly exhaust analytical resources. However, it may be feasible to analyze, in general form, the decisions faced by classes of individuals (e.g., parents of small children, the immunocompromised, the uninsured) (Fischhoff, 2005). With the fateful choices posed by disasters, the return on that investment may be large, both in absolute terms (considering the ad hoc advice that it would replace) and relative to fine-tuning analyses for policy makers.…”

Advances in Risk Assessment and Communication

“…The distinction between social sciences and social studies is not always apparent to those outside the field. Fischhoff (29,30,119) has emphasized that the former primarily involves systematic data collection, statistical analysis, and hypothesis testing, whereas the latter involves more qualitative approaches to obtaining insights about underlying processes.…”