While face-to-face and Internet-based psychotherapies are consistently shown effective in clinical trials, dissemination and implementation of psychological service of depression continue to be a challenge. Identifying treatment preferences by discrete choice experiment (DCE), which investigates how people trade-off different features associated with the psychological service, could provide better insights of service users’ preferences than conventional surveys using Likert scale. With the knowledge of people’s preference, ultimately, implementation can be facilitated by informed reallocation of health resource. Yet, to date, little is known about how people with depression weight different features of their psychological care.

 

The aims of this study are:

1. to examine the relative importance of a series of characteristics of psychological services (e.g., delivery modality, waiting time, out-of-pocket service fee, anonymity and referral methods) on choices of psychological service

2. to identify segments of people with depression with heterogeneity service preferences

3. to simulate the utilization figures of face-to-face and internet-based psychotherapies, and to derive informed suggestion for mental health policy.

 

We will be recruiting for participants very soon in the second to third quarter of 2022. Stay tuned for recruitment information. Thanks!