Open AccessTowards capability-adjusted life years in public health and social welfare: Results from a Swedish survey on ranking capabilities
Author(s) -
Anna Månsdotter,
Björn Ekman,
Kaspar Walter Meili,
Inna Feldman,
Lars Hagberg,
AnnaKarin Hurtig,
Lars Lindholm
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0242699
Subject(s) - ranking (information retrieval) , psychological intervention , welfare , public health , mental health , context (archaeology) , social determinants of health , quality of life (healthcare) , social welfare , rank (graph theory) , social security , psychology , gerontology , public relations , applied psychology , political science , medicine , computer science , nursing , geography , archaeology , machine learning , psychiatry , law , psychotherapist , mathematics , combinatorics
The aim of this study was to rank capabilities and suggest a relevant set of capabilities for the Swedish context to inform the development of capability-adjusted life years (CALYs). CALYs is a quality of life measure for policy making based on the capability approach by Amartya Sen. Materials and methods A Swedish governmental review proposed the following 10 relevant capabilities: time, financial situation, mental/physical health, political resources, knowledge, living environment, occupation, social relations, security, and housing. Researchers in health-related disciplines from 5 universities ranked these capabilities from 1 to 10 (most to least important) in a web-based cross-sectional survey; 115 of 171 responses were eligible. Results Health, social relations, and financial situation were deemed most important. Stratification by gender, research field, and age group revealed few differences. We found that it was possible to rank capabilities and that health, social relations, and financial situation were ranked highest by a non-representative sample of researchers and doctoral students from health-related disciplines at five Swedish universities. Conclusions The revealed ranking is dependent on the metric and must be further explored. The findings support continued development of CALYs for monitoring and evaluating outcomes in public health and social-welfare interventions.