MethodsCon in Manchester We have attended MethodsCon: Futures in Manchester, run by the National Centre for Research Methods on 11 and 12 September 2024 to present Harmony, the NLP and AI tool we have been developing for researchers in social science, funded by Wellcome and the Economic and Social Research Council. The events took place at The Edwardian Manchester. Methods Showcase – 11th September The first event was a workshop on 11 September:
BMC Psychiatry has published our paper validating Harmony on real-world data We are pleased to announce the publication of a paper validating Harmony on real-life data: Using natural language processing to facilitate the harmonisation of mental health questionnaires: a validation study using real-world data, authored by Eoin McElroy, Thomas Wood, Raymond Bond, Maurice Mulvenna, Mark Shevlin, George B. Ploubidis, Mauricio Scopel Hoffmann and Bettina Moltrecht, and published in BMC Psychiatry.
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Longevity is a tricky topic in software development. We’ve been thinking about how we can make sure that Harmony continues to operate for a long time in the future, since Harmony is intended as a public good for researchers to use with no strings attached (an open source tool for social science). Sustainability assessment In April 2023, we completed the software sustainability assessment with the Software Sustainability Institute, which gave us 29 recommended improvements to make Harmony more sustainable.
Now more than ever, the international research community are keen to determine whether their findings replicate across different contexts. For instance, if a researcher discovers a potentially important association between two variables, they may wish to see whether this association is present in other populations (e.g. different countries, or different generations). In an ideal world, this would be achieved by conducting follow-up studies that are harmonised by design. In other words, the exact same methodologies and measures would be used in a new sample, in order to determine whether the findings can be replicated.
New Discoveries for Patient and Public Involvement About one year ago I fully entered the world of secondary data analysis research – away from applied mental health research with creative data collection methods and small sample sizes, towards big data and complex analyses efforts to overcome what someone deemed not worth measuring (Wait, why are we not assessing emotion regulation in each and every study 1?) Of course, I know we can’t measure everything and the decision of what to measure in studies is one of the hardest to make.
