Abstract
Importance weighting is a common practice in Quality of Life (QOL) research. The basic idea is that items for specific life domains contained in a QOL measurement have different importance for different individuals; therefore, in capturing participants' perceptions, feelings, or evaluations in these domains, information on domain importance should be incorporated into the scoring procedure and reflected in the final score. Accordingly, importance weighting is proposed to serve this purpose, and the common procedure is to weight the satisfaction score by the importance score for each domain. This idea is so common that many instruments adopted this weighting procedure in their scoring system without examining its necessity and appropriateness. To date, there is extensive evidence to draw the conclusion of the (in)appropriateness of using importance weighting of satisfaction scores. Hence, the purpose of this article is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the issue of importance weighting. In the following sections, I first introduce the notion of importance weighting. Then, the empirical utility of importance weighting is reviewed to see if importance weighting contributes to predicting criterion variables. In the third section, the literature on the appropriateness of importance weighting based on a psychological perspective is reviewed. Finally, a conclusion on importance weighting and the implications for QOL are provided.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Personality Assessment |
| Subtitle of host publication | New Research |
| Publisher | Nova Science Publishers Inc |
| Pages | 109-139 |
| Number of pages | 31 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781606927960 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |