Yesterday I caught up a wonderful former PhD student and spent a couple of hours, mostly on the floor, with her and her one year old son. We talked mainly about families, children, parenting and grandparenting. (Ooh, now I remember there was a time when for me that word “grandparenting” meant the ways in which people with experience and skills but without the increasingly onerous and formalised therapy trainings could be admitted to the registers of therapists. Lovely to be out of all that organisational strife, nastiness and internecine warfare now!)
But, as usual, I digress! At one point E asked me “So what are you doing these days? Is it mostly CORE?” I paused, then said, in feeble tones “Well, yes a lot of it is still CORE but I am trying to do more of other things” and realised that, despite my “What do I do?!” post back in September that I had again fluffed an opportunity to say more. That was also fluffing an opportunity that would have helped me as E knows me well and would have had wise things to say. Aarghh! Hence this post, perhaps a bit early to review 2024 with three weeks left but here I go.
So I had a think about 2024 and went back to that post which gave me these headings.
- CORE
- Politically critical stance
- Making tools available
- Methods, particularly psychometrics
So what have I done in 2024?
Disclaimer
Very little of this was done by me working alone and the number of people who have helped is too great to list here. I can only ever help and steer translations and all my papers this year were co-authored (as almost all my papers). The infrastructure work (see below) is mostly mine but that would be much harder without practical and intellectual support from UDLA (Universidad de Las Américas, Quito, Ecuador) and from Professor Clara Paz there.
OK, to the headings.
CORE (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/)
Earlier in the week I had tried to summarise my CORE work since 2022 in a “long overdue” post to the CORE update list (archive here, do sign up here if you are interested: never more than monthly posts). Looking at 2024 I think the key achievements are these.
- Almost all the 40 or so translations of the CORE-OM (and its short forms) and the YP-CORE are now on the CORE web site in nice PDFs (around 240 separate PDFs).
- I’ve kept the CORE site alive and developing (slower than I’d like but it is developing!) and it gets over 400 visits a day.
- I’ve resuscitated the update list twice (!) but only just restarted posting to it.
- New translations of the CORE-OM into Setswana and the YP-CORE into Swedish completed; Swahili & Dholuo translations of the CORE-OM and German translation of the YP-CORE underway.
- Shiny scoring apps created for the CSC classification of the YP-CORE and to score CORE-OM item data.
- Four peer-reviewed papers out about CORE in 2024 (see that CORE update post for details).
Yes there is that work around CORE and I am still hugely proud of CORE. However, narcissistically I’d be sorry to be remembered as “Oh, yes, didn’t he do things around CORE?” So …
Not CORE!
Well a huge amount of time has gone into this but so much of it has been infrastructure work. Most is on, or linked to, my non-CORE work site: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/. However, as it’s infrastructure it is hard to list simply quantifiable “impacts”. I plans emerging for how that will change in 2025.
Critical political stance
I have become clearer and clearer over recent years, but certainly through 2024, that we are doing devastating and often irreversible damage to our planet, that we are in an age of “enshittification” and what may be a terminal phase of capitalism. This has seen exploitation by the super wealthy and their corporations of the remaining 99% of the world’s population with a savage and often lethal impact on the poorest. In my research worlds I see a lot of “Lancet commissions” and other political hand wringing about aspects of this but I think they, and the wider research/academic publishing industry, are generally shoring up these horrors. I am chipping away at this in largely impotent ways partly by awareness of these issues in my writings, more usefully in my collaborations and partly by what I am making freely available: this next heading.
Making tools available
Well all the CORE instruments have always been copyleft and, as of 2015, formally located under the appropriate Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. I’m hugely proud of that. Similarly, pretty much everything I put on the CORE and PSYCTC.org web sites is in the International (CC BY-ND 4.0) licence. (So you can reuse as much or as little of that, even commercially, whereas for the CORE instruments the conditions are that reproduction must not be just for profit and cannot involve any changes: that preserves comparability of findings.) In addition:
- My online glossary for our book (Evans & Carlyle (2021) Outcome measures and evaluation in counselling and psychotherapy. SAGE Publishing. https://ombook.psyctc.org/book/) is at 329 entries and continues to expand.
- My Rblog, which gives much more detailed expansion than the glossary of topics in psychometrics, therapy research, always with R code, is also continuing to expand. Have a look!
- As well as the two CORE specific shiny apps, there are other interactive apps here and their number, power, sophistication and their wider usefulness is increasing … at least, I hope so!
- For those who use the R system for their quantitative work my CECPfuns package of functions aimed particularly at supporting less geeky R users and people using R for therapy, mental health/well-being work has been expanding a bit again.
Methods and psychometrics
Nothing concrete out on this year other than things wrapped in the glossary, Rblog, shiny apps and CECPfuns package but I have managed to push forward with a lot of thinking and simulation work so a number of papers are, at last brewing up for submission in 2025 and Clara have a plan about how to keep me to task on this so it does at last start to deliver in that way.
Life outside of work
I do have a life beyond work, bits of that emerge in my non-work web site: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/ and my blog there.
Post created 7.xii.24. Author CE & creator of the header image (“mer de nuages”, “sea of clouds” and Mont Blanc from Aime2000, France) CE; licence for text and image: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).