Just over two months since my last post which was reviewing what I’d achieved in work terms in 2024 and now we’re already in the second month of 2025. I guess it’s not bad that it’s only been two months since I last set fingers to keyboard here: that’s much faster than usual. Also, as I am generally pairing posts with Emails through the, currently tiny, PSYCTC.org Email update list, I am not endangering my undertaking never to to Email more than once a month!
I did put a new post in my non-work site: Still an artisan researcher three years on, but in a deteriorating moral world. That refers back to a post there from 2022: Being an artisan researcher. They are both, as the titles say, about being researcher so they’re probably interesting to people following my actual research products here on PSYCTC.org. They also anticipate, to some extent a post that is developing in my head for next month. That came out of discovering my former St. George’s colleague, Robert West’s, post “What makes for ethical behavioural science? My personal 10 commandments” on his Unlocking Behaviour Change substack. I don’t think mine will be a 10 commandments but he’s correct to urge us to clarify our ethical positions.
More on that in a month’s time I hope! For now I am listing the non-CORE work products that have emerged here in the last two months.
The glossary
Originally the glossary to our book Evans, C., & Carlyle, J. (2021). Outcome measures and evaluation in counselling and psychotherapy (1st ed.). SAGE Publishing. https://ombook.psyctc.org/book/ it now covers a much wider collection of terms that come up in research and evidence production in relation to psychosocial interventions. Here are the additions from the last two months, you can see that they vary a lot in the complexity and size.
Qualitative psychometrics
Censored data & censoring
Right censored data
Left censored data
Interval censored data
Type I censoring
Type II censoring
DALYs
Derangements
Clinical Outcome Assessments (COAs)
WSAS
performance outcome (PerfO) measures (PerfOMs, POMS)
observer-reported outcome (ObsRO) measures and (ObsROMs, OROMs)
Patient/client-reported outcome measures (PROMs)
Covert vs. overt items
rank correlation
Projective tests
Problem ratings
Bifactor models
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
Hierarchical factor models
Principal component analysis (PCA)
Autocorrelation [and more in an Rblog post, see below]
Markov/Markovian process
Partial autocorrelation function (PACF)
Partial correlation
Cluster analysis
Similarity indices/coefficients
PHQ-8
PHQ-9
You can get to any of these that interest you from here: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/book/glossary/.
The Rblog
Apart from entries that are about how to do things in R (and occasionally other IT/s’ware things) this is mostly about issues that are too big to put into glossary entries. These take a bit of time. Two new ones:
- Autocorrelation (an explanation with data)
- Mapping dates to episodes (mostly a “howto” using tidyverse R code, quite a nice plot of the mapping with the code that makes this very easy in ggplot)
My shiny apps
Only one new one and it’s actually been there for months so it’s quite well tested. A search interface to the database we built of all peer-reviewed papers relating to the CORE system published in English or Spanish up to the end of 2021. That is here. It complements the paper
Paz, Unda-López, Valdiviezo-Oña, Fernando Chávez, Elias Herrera Criollo, Toscano-Molina & Evans (2025).
Mapping the growth of the CORE system tools in psychotherapy research from 1998 to 2021: Learning from historical evidence.
Psychotherapy Research, 1–12.
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2025.2457389.
I hope it’s going to make it easy for people thinking of using CORE instruments, or of publishing about their use of them, to find what has already been published. It was a huge job of essentially unfunded work (mostly not by me, though the app is by me!) Clara Paz and I will look into finding funding to update it and to keep it current but both finding funding, and the work involved, are substantial jobs. Any advice or offers of help, do contact me.
CECPfuns package
No new things here. What is there continues to pass all the built in tests but I know the whole package needs a bit of a rethink as it has evolved over nearly three years now and could do with some harmonisation of the function arguments and integration with the tidyverse. That overhaul is probably not going to happen this year but I do hope to add a few more functions during the year.
Onwards!