Bio

Participation
3

MD, PhD student on healthcare priorities with an emphasis on moral weights and measuring health-related quality of life.

Comments
2

Not exactly my field, but I had a quick chat with a conveniently located senior researcher at work. This is a synthesis of our thoughts:

Summary: Might be a bit ambitious, but doable if you are well prepared.

Feasibility: The number and availability of of informants will be crucial. Do you already have contacts or a way in? I frequently see people (including myself) grossly underestimate the time it takes to collect data. How many informants? If you plan to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal, aiming for more than the minimum (I don't know, 8?) is probably wise.

Transferability: I would imagine some findings would be generalisable to similar countries at least.

Methods: What are your options? Would a survey be possible? Need more people but is maybe easier to analyse. Thematic Analysis is a good pragmatic approach. Because of this pragmatism however, your current description lack some detail on how you will actually do the analysis (except the general steps). For example, how will you relate the data to your concept model? You won't have much time to figure this out during your 10 weeks. Especially if you have never analysed interviews before.

How to conduct interviews: If you know someone who already is doing a similar analysis, see if you can sit in on an interview, working session or supervision session and observe. It helped me the time I wrote a thematic analysis paper (but I will not offer or trust my own skills here)

Pitfalls: Just want to reiterate that data collection sometimes takes much more time than anticipated, and you should expect to spend 80% of your time on analysis.

Thank you for a very interesting read.

It seems like an important crux in your analysis is quantifying the intensity of CH.

I'd like to point out that QALYs as a metric is not mentioned here. In the QALY-paradigm, the utility weights are anchored at 1 = full health and 0 = dead. Importantly, negative utility weights are also theoretically possible. For example, an utility weight of -10.0 would imply that removing one person-year of CH would be equivalent to 11 QALYs (which is equivalent to the absolute prognosis loss for one person with chronic migraine, according to one random report from the Norwegian Medical Products Agency i just dug up). However, current methods for eliciting negative values are imprecise and somewhat arbitrary. I've been thinking about whether developing better metrics within the QALY paradigm can be useful, since it is more widely adopted. CHs would be the perfect example case. Curious to hear if you have any thoughts on this.