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METHODS article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Health Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1385422

Discrete Choice Experiments: A Primer for the Communication Researcher

Provisionally accepted
Reed Reynolds Reed Reynolds 1*Lucy Popova Lucy Popova 2Bo Yang Bo Yang 3Jordan Louviere Jordan Louviere 4James Thrasher James Thrasher 5
  • 1 University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, United States
  • 2 Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
  • 3 University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States
  • 4 University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
  • 5 University of South Carolina, Columbia, Missouri, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Experiments are widely used in communication research to help establish cause and effect, however, studies published in communication journals rarely use discrete choice experiments (DCEs). DCEs have become a mainstay in fields such as behavioral economics, medicine, and public policy, and can be used to enhance research on the effects of message attributes across a wide range of domains and modalities. DCEs are powerful for disentangling the influence of many message attributes with modest sample sizes and participant burden. The benefits of DCEs result from multiple design elements including stimulus sets that elicit direct comparisons, blocked and/or fractional factorial structures, and a wide range of analytic options. Though sophisticated, the tools necessary to implement a DCE are freely available, and this article provides resources to communication scholars and practitioners seeking to add DCEs to their own methodological repertoire.

    Keywords: Discrete choice experiments, Balanced incomplete block designs, fractional factorial designs, message evaluation tasks, Conjoint analysis (CA)

    Received: 12 Feb 2024; Accepted: 24 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Reynolds, Popova, Yang, Louviere and Thrasher. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Reed Reynolds, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.