A Ghost of Research Past: Developing a measure for R=MC2
A few years ago, I was involved in a project to develop a readiness measure based in the R=MC2 framework. I developed this model back in grad school, and continued to develop it over the next few years in my dissertation work and with past colleagues at the Wandersman Center. Under the leadership of Maria…
Reading (and understanding) Scientific Articles
So you’ve started using PubTrawlr and you’re ready to dive deeper. You follow some links to the primary source, open then up….and it’s gobbledygook. Take a deep breath. This a very common experience. Articles are not easy to read. This isn’t the latest from Stephen King. There is likely to be a ton of jargon.…
Will QCA ever happen? The Promises of the Dark Carnival.
In Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a mysterious carnival comes to town and promises to grant the secret desires of the residents…at a price. Researchers have these desires, too. We are searching for the next method, the next data set that will yield wonderful findings and allow us to have an impact on…
Ending the 17-year gap–The Role of PubTrawlr
17 years. Research into the medical and social sciences indicates that it can take up to 17 years before a scientific finding makes its way into regular practice[1],[2],[3],[4],[5] This fact is troubling. There are tens of thousands of academic journals filled with literally millions of great ideas and notable findings. So why aren’t these used?…
Evaluation in Health Services Settings: Reader’s Digest Version
Many years ago when the world was young, Drs. Victoria Scott and Kassy Alia-Ray and I wrote a book chapter on how to approach evaluation in community health improvement. That book chapter had a long and circuitous route to publication. Imagine my surprise when just yesterday, a box showed up with two printed copies. This…
Shhh! It’s a secret.
Have you stumbled across this very short blog post? Well, lucky you! PubTrawlr is now live and in beta testing! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be trying out various features and more or less trying to break the interface and the results. However, that doesn’t have to stop you from using it. In fact,…
101 Days of Community Psychology
I’m a community psychologist by training/degree, though like most quasi-academics, my portfolio and interests aren’t constrained to one field. This is the reality for community psychology. It is extremely broad from a content and methodological standpoint. However, it’s really important to stay on top of recently developments and trends, so I wanted to take a…
Wouldn’t mama be proud? A sentiment analysis of Elliott Smith lyrics
I’ve been an Elliott Smith kick this past month. Although I was one of the lucky ones to see him live (back in 1998 at the now-defunct Trocadero in Philly), his music really didn’t click for me until I was in my mid-30s. My key hypothesis: It’s not just sad bastard music. Smith had some…
Making Sense of Data in Practical and Collaborative Settings
When working in community-based settings, there is often a reluctance to engage in evaluation. I generally try to emphasize three main points at the beginning of collaborations. Data is everywhere. There are many ways that we can understand what is happening in our communities. Sometimes, we put out surveys to ask people about their beliefs…
Not Another Implementation Barriers and Facilitation Post!
I think if I read another “barriers and facilitators” article about implementation, I might conk right out here at my desk. There was one just this morning! Hell, here’s one from just one week prior! The reality is that these articles are all too common. Broadly, I pretty sure that I’ve the read sentence, “A…
Fitter, Happier, More Productive. Some words on Weiner el al (2020)’s “Measuring Readiness for Implementation”
Stop the presses! A readiness-measure review paper came out this morning in Implementation Research and Practice, a brand new journal from the SIRC folks focusing on implementation issues in behavioral health. Bryan Weiner had a readiness measure review paper about 12 years ago that was extremely influential in my own thinking on how readiness can…
“Let’s just kick the ball around.” A first-time soccer coach & implementation
Update 4.15.21. And it’s not Spring 2021, and soccer is back. I’ve got a new cohort of U5 kids we’ve been having a lot of fun. I’m certainly a better coach than when I started. There’s something to this experiential learning. Original post below! Another post I’m porting over. Man, it would be such a…
