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Governments and healthcare funders worldwide are making increasing use of economic evaluation to inform priority setting in health care. For various reasons, cost benefit analysis is usually rejected in favour of cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analyses, often involving the estimation of the incremental cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) gained (Drummond et al, 2005). The estimation of QALYs gained requires valuations for all relevant health states on a scale anchored at 1 = Full health and 0 = Dead.

The Time Trade-Off (TTO) method has played an important role in generating value sets for the EQ-5D. As one of the most widely accepted preference elicitation methods for health states (Torrance, 1986) and the method of choice in the first largescale EQ-5D valuation study (Dolan, 1997), the TTO has become the preferred approach among EuroQol Group researchers who wanted to use a choice-based elicitation technique to value EQ-5D health states in their own countries.

In addition to the Time Trade-Off approach, the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) has become the other widely used method to elicit preferences for the EQ-5D. Its less demanding nature, easy administration, and favourable evidence regarding its psychometric characteristics made the VAS attractive to include in large postal surveys in more than 10 countries.

One of the most common questions asked of the EuroQol Group by those wishing to use EQ-5D value sets in economic evaluation is ‘ value set should I use?’ The aim of this chapter is to provide advice on this question, and to guide potential users through the issues that are pertinent to choosing which of the value sets described earlier to use.