Using best-worst scaling to improve psychological service delivery: an innovative tool for psychologists in organized...

With the growth of client-centered and patient-as-consumer approaches to care, understanding the preferences of psychologists' patients has never been more important. Traditional methods for measuring preference, such as Likert-type rating scales, suffer from well-known limitations, including subjectivity and positive bias. Best-worst scaling (BWS) provides an opportunity to address some of these limitations. Despite the growing use of BWS to measure preference in other areas, BWS methods are not being used in the study of psychologists' patients. We demonstrate BWS data collection and analysis. With a sample of only 31 clients from 2 Australian psychology practices, we show the strength of preference for different aspects of psychologists' appointments can be measured accurately. Additionally, the inclusion of readily available timing data from responses improved measurement sensitivity and statistical power.