Content of draft version of survey following academic workshop | |
• Brief description of the main study purpose | |
• Questions regarding age, marital status, education, affiliation with labor market and experiences with illness and health care | |
• ‘Control Preferences Scale’, a validated instrument that measured the degree of control an individual wants to assume when making decisions about medical treatment [22]a | |
• Validated 10-item personality measure (the Big Five Inventory-10; BFI-10) [23]a | |
• Subsequently, study participants were introduced to the case vignette set-up: “Imagine that You yourself attend the following sequence of encounters with your doctor …” . Participants were randomized into one of 30 different scenarios with an identical core structure though differing with respect to | |
∘ (a) information from the doctor about the PSA test (five variants ranging from no information or participation of patients in decision-making to participation of patients through SDM; see Fig. 1) | |
∘ (b) the decision to have a PSA or not | |
∘ (c) three outcome scenarios (a favorable outcome with no PCa, a fatal scenario with non treatable PCa, and an intermediate scenario with PCa detected but succesfully treated) with reference to scenarios reported in the health law literature [19, 21]b | |
• Following presentation of the case vignette, assessments were conducted concerning how satisfied the respondent would be with health care if he was the patient illustrated in the vignette and the likelihood that he would initiate a malpractice complaint. Items used for this assessment were modified from two previously validated instruments: The Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire, PSQ-18 [24] and the Consumer Complaint Intentions and Behavior questionnaire [25, 26]. Ratings were done on Likert scales (e.g. from very satisfied to very dissatisfied). Also participants were asked about their ability to identify with the patient in the scenario described in the vignette and their knowledge of the PSA test. |