{"id":1356,"date":"2018-06-28T13:08:34","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T19:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2018-06-28T13:08:34","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T19:08:34","slug":"methodology-best-predictors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/methodology-best-predictors\/","title":{"rendered":"methodology: best predictors"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early June, an article I wrote with co-authors about the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET<\/font>) was published in the journal Psychological Assessment<\/em> (Dainer-Best, Lee, Shumake, Yeager, & Beevers, in press). The article is entitled “Determining optimal parameters of the Self Referent Encoding Task: A large-scale examination of self-referent cognition and depression”<\/a>, and you can find it on the publisher’s website by following that link. (If you are unable to access the publisher’s copy, an updated post-print ((The online database SHERPA defines a post-print<\/a> as “The final version of an academic article or other publication—after it has been peer-reviewed and revised into its final form by the author.” As a general rule, this means the version of the manuscript that is to be published—but not in the journal’s style. As such, the link there is to a version of the manuscript that I created in LaTeX. )) is available on the Open Science Framework, here<\/a>.) I’m very pleased to see that this article has been published. <\/p>\n

I think the conclusions we reach are worthwhile. This article is primarily about methodology in studying depression, and we took this opportunity to investigate a commonly-used task on a larger-than-normal scale and across three samples (572 college students, 293 adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and 270 adolescents). We were interested in answering this question: what is the best way to link how people describe themselves (what we call “self-referential processing”) to how elevated they are in terms of depressive symptoms? Researchers often use the task mentioned above (the Self-Referent Encoding Task, or SRET<\/font>) to measure self-referential processing. Here, we collected data on that behavioral task, and measured depressive symptoms with a questionnaire. The SRET<\/font> has a number of outcomes, from simple endorsements (do you describe yourself using positive and negative words?) to computational outcomes (what I elsewhere call “the rate of accumulation of information needed to make the decision about whether each word was self-referential”). By using a recursive validation procedure, we were able to make a pretty good argument for which outcomes from the SRET<\/font> should be the focus for future work: the number of positive and negative words that individuals endorse as being self-referential, and the processed responses which mark “accumulation of information”—but not the reaction times or recall of words.<\/p>\n

Additionally, this article gave me the opportunity to begin expressing a long-held interest in open science. I published our data and code<\/a> on the Texas Data Repository, published the pre-print (when I submitted the article—updated to the post-print, above), and laid out several of our analyses in supplemental websites on GitHub<\/a>. I also created a Shiny app<\/a> which allows you to visualize the correlations between variables. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early June, an article I wrote with co-authors about the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET) was published in the journal Psychological Assessment (Dainer-Best, Lee, Shumake, Yeager, & Beevers, in press). The article is entitled “Determining optimal parameters of the Self Referent Encoding Task: A large-scale examination of self-referent cognition and depression”, and you can find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1369,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions\/1369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.justindb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}