SUMMARY
David T. Eton, Ph.D., is a social-health psychologist with expertise in the measurement of patient health-status and quality-of-life outcomes, especially as it pertains to coping with chronic health conditions. His current work focuses on patient-perceived burden of treatment and self-management, including exploration of factors that may promote or lessen burden as well as identification of possible causal pathways.
Dr. Eton has published extensively across a broad spectrum of health care research, including clinical trials and observational studies; development and psychometrics of self-report measures; psychosocial issues in chronic illness; qualitative and mixed methods designs, systematic reviews; and clinical significance of scores on patient health-status measures.
Focus areas
Dr. Eton's areas of interest include:
- Treatment and self-care burden
- Development, validation and testing of patient self-report measures
- Social, psychological and behavioral determinants of health and quality of life
- Cancer survivorship, long-term psychosocial and behavioral adjustment
- Prognostic ability and clinical utility of health-status measures
Significance to patient care
Broadly, Dr. Eton's research is designed to better understand what "quality of life" means to the health care consumer, with the ultimate goal of using such information to tailor care to the needs of the individual.