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. 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 harmonized 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.
