Older women's preferences for information to support healthy choices for alcohol use and physical activity: A discrete choice experiment

Health information offered to older women to inform healthy lifestyle choices that support self-management of their chronic conditions can promote healthy aging. Primary care providers are important sources of healthy lifestyle information but less than half of older women receive such information from their physicians. Physicians site barriers including limitation on office visit time and lack of reimbursement. This research considers another barrier: Are women influenced by primary care providers' healthy lifestyle recommendations, or do they prefer information from other sources? The conceptual model is drawn from social network and communication theory, linked to concepts from the field of decision-making and behavioral economics. This framework guides this study's analysis of older women's choice in health information, to examine: 1) do attributes of health information predict older women's choice of health information, and 2) are there differences in preferred attributes when women choose information related to physical activity compared to healthy alcohol use? A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted with a sample of 110 women 65 and older in a primary care setting, to measure women's health information preferences. Respondents highly preferred information suggested by their physician compared to other sources, and preferred group classes to learn about exercise but chose printed materials to learn about alcohol use. This study found that the physician is the most influential source of information to promote an older woman's healthy aging, suggesting that chronic disease self-management programs should carefully sustain a primary role for the physician in providing health information to older women.