Category Archives: Measurement

Playing the alphabet factor game: the S factor for satisfaction

I also wanted to make a name for myself in the competitive field of alphabet factoring in psychology. G factor. P factor. I factor. D factor. Aaaaall the factors. My recent list is already outdated. So here I’ll introduce the S factor, for satisfaction. Look how satisfied this little student frog is! Seriously though, there… Read more »

Which depression measure is best?

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A new paper published today in Lancet Psychiatry, led by Christopher Veal, reports findings from a systemic review of 450 clinical trials for unipolar and bipolar depression. Our results can be seen as trying to answer one of the oldest questions in the field of depression measurement: which of the over 200 measures is the… Read more »

Schmeasurement: DSM-5 symptom measure edition

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For our new WARN-D research project on building a personalized early warning system for depression, I recently looked into openly available, transdiagnostic, self-report mental health screeners. The most common recommendation was to use the DSM-5 Self-Rated Level 1 Cross-Cutting Symptom Measure (Adult). This measure was released by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) — the organization… Read more »

Ecological momentary assessment: app vs web tools?

This is going to be a very brief post, given my current time constraints. We are setting up a large Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study. I have some experience with EMA from running studies myself (e.g. on student mental health during COVID19) and collaborations, but the field is growing rapidly, and so we spent some… Read more »

Workshops online: formalizing theories, network models, and questionable measurement practices

In the last month, I got to give 3 workshops on fairly different topics, and we made all materials available now. I also followed Lisa’s example (thanks for the tip!) and created an OSF website specifically for my talks and workshops. This blog summarizes the last workshops, and provides links to all materials. 1. Formalizing… Read more »

Measurement Schmeasurement

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TL;DR This post summarizes our recent APS symposium entitled “Measurement Schmeasurement” (feat. Jessica Flake, Mijke Rhemtulla, Andre Wang, and Scott Lilienfeld); provides a brief history of how it came to be, and the important role social media plays in modern psychology; and serves as a shameless plug for an invited measurement workshop Jessica and I… Read more »

New paper: the 52 symptoms of major depression

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I published a new paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders entitled “The 52 symptoms of major depression: Lack of content overlap among seven common depression scales” (PDF). The paper examines content overlap of 7 common depression scales, and concludes that the scales feature 52 distinct depression symptoms that are listed in the main Figure… Read more »

New paper on responsiveness of depression rating scales

After reviewing the paper “The relative responsiveness of test instruments can be estimated using a meta-analytic approach: an illustration with treatments for depression” by Kounali et al. 2016, the editor invited me to write a response because I raised the point that a large amount of researchers seem to misunderstand the concept of scale responsiveness…. Read more »