Earlier this week, I attended the conference SweSRII: The 13th Swedish Congress on Internet Interventions.
The SweSRII conference gathers researchers from all over the world to share their knowledge and experiences on using and developing Internet-based interventions. Its aim is to contribute to the development and dissemination of the best possible psychological interventions to help people in need.
There were a plethora of interesting topics that were presented and I can’t help but to list a few insights that spiked my interest:
- More than 10,000 people have sought internet-deliverd help through the darknet (e.g., using TOR browser).
- Unguided and therapist-guided internet-based psychotherapy yield similar results when follow-up measurements are evaluated but guided therapy outperforms unguided therapy at post-assessment. This gives credence to the idea that unguided internet-based psychotherapy is a viable treatment option, a particularly important finding given the low cost associated with providing such treatment.
- Embrace gamification to the fullest! Simply adding gamified elements won’t automatically boost engagement, so it’s worth putting in the effort to get the gamification just right.
- It’s important to spend some time learning about the correct methods for presenting within-group effect sizes from linear mixed models. There’s a lot of confusion around how to calculate these effect sizes, and different methods can give very different results, some of which are incorrect.
This list is definitely not exhaustive, and I felt privileged to be part of the many experts sharing their research at the SweSRII conference.
My Presentation
I gave a presentation on the importance of measurement in digital mental health (see here, page 13).
I argue that it is immensely important to get the measurement right. That means that when assessing something, you must keep at least two questions in mind: What are you measuring and why are you measuring it?
The what relates to well-known concepts in research. Namely, reliability – which can roughly be conceptualized as the stability of measurement over time – and validity – which can be thought of as an indicator for whether you actually are measuring what you are purporting to measure.
Another thing that has in recent years become evident is an interest in the positive aspects of life such as subjective well-being and quality of life. Here it is important to note that positive functioning is not the same thing as the absence of illness or pathology. Positive functioning is something more than that. It encapsulates the “goodness” of life. In other words, just because you don’t feel bad per se, does not necessarily mean that you feel good!
Equally important though is to think through why you are measuring it. For instance, if you are administering the PHQ or GAD scales, are you trying to identify mechanisms driving change? Are you using them as indicators of treatment outcomes? Monitoring in-treatment symptoms? As screening tools for studies? Or even to quantify symptom severity?
Just because you don’t feel bad per se, does not necessarily mean that you feel good!
All of these questions are relevant when choosing measurement instruments, and not thinking through the why and the what – the reason and relevance of the instrument in questing – can lead to spurious associations and insufficient statistical control for confounding variables.
I was thrilled to be surrounded by such incredibly talented individuals at the SweSRII conference. I am eagerly anticipating future SWEsrii events and I can already tell that it will be a staple in my annual list of must-attend conferences!
I want to give a big shoutout to Stockholm University for being an amazing host, and huge thanks to Per Carlbring, Nora Choque Olsson, Gerhard Andersson, and George Vlaescu for putting together such an incredible event!
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