I see my last post here was pretty much a month ago (33 days in fact!) That’s probably the rhythm I would always have liked to have achieved but mostly I’m either working too hard on things with deadlines to put time into posts, or else I feel there’s nothing very interesting to say!
So, I certainly have been busy and a few papers are finally getting submitted or resubmitted. I returned to the UK from my Alpine eyrie on the 24th and I have a work trip to Latin America looming. That’s to Ecuador, Chile and perhaps Costa Rica and starts at the end of May. Still a lot to prepare for that. Between now and then I will also be scuttling around the UK but that’s family and social rather than work!
Sadly the timing means that I won’t overlap with my old friend, Gregory Hadley who is over in the UK from his home in Japan. He and I were very early internet collaborators when we got some work done purely by Email. That resulted in a chapter: Hadley, G., & Evans, C. (2001). Constructions across a Culture Gap. In Action Research (pp. 129–143). TESOL Inc. For me the collaboration also definitely expanded my thinking about culture, language and how learning and teaching work. We didn’t actually meet in 3D until much later and Gregory has since become a real expert on Grounded Theory. While he’s over here he’s running a course on GT:
I really recommend it not only because he is a real expert but also because I know how profoundly he has thought about teaching and learning. If you can get to it you will get a first class experience.
Meanwhile, here’s a summary of new things on this site.
The online glossary started for the OMbook has gone up from 266 to 294 entries so I am pretty close to adding one a day. Recent additions have been pretty diverse: the EQ-5D-5L, health economics; transforming including standardising/normalising, t-scores and z-scores; entries on validity: concurrent, divergent/discriminant and predictive; the Crown-Crisp Experiential Inventory (CCEI); linear regression, intercept and slope; attenuation by unreliability; and things like scoring (sounds simple but …) and what an RDBMS is (and why it might matter).
In the Rblog I see that one on issues with convergent validity which expands on the glossary entry was actually created just before the last post here but I mention it as I think it’s one the more import posts there. The only changes have been tweaks and improvements to some entries, particularly the one on creating a shiny server.
Which brings me to the shiny server. Progress has been slow and the only new app is one that computes all the scores from CORE-OM item data. That’s working and has had a bit of external testing. It assumes that the data are being submitted in the form of the Excel spreadsheet I created back in cv-19 lockdown for practitioners suddenly using the CORE-OM online and using it via Micro$oft forms. That spreadsheet did compute scores but a researcher reported that it wasn’t working for him and he’s quite correct. I puzzled as it definitely did work and I’d like to blame some failure of backwards compatibility in M$oft Ugcell but that’s probably unfair. Anyway, rather the fix a spreadsheet that I hate and that clearly no-one is using it spurred me to create the scoring app. As well as the correctly pro-rated domain and full scale scores for the CORE-OM it also gives you the CORE-6D health utility scoring and all the scores for the embedded items of the adult short forms: CORE-SF/A, CORE-SF/B, CORE-10 and GP-CORE in case you might be using one of them between CORE-OM completions. In itself this app isn’t a particularly great step forward but the important thing is that it is a prototype, with work I’ve been doing on the shiny code for uploading and pasting in data. Putting those together I can now create a bunch of apps for scoring CORE measure data submitted in various formats. That’s something I’ve wanted for years and should , I hope, be useful for practitioners not affording and using any of the (often excellent) systems for inputting and analysing CORE and other questionnaire data.
That’s it for now. Next update from somewhere ikn Latin America I suspect/hope!
Created 28.iv.24, author CE & header image (clouds on Mont Blanc from Aime, just before I returned to the UK) CE; licence for text and image: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).