
Gerrit Hirschfeld- Professor
- Professor (Full) at Hochschule Bielefeld
Gerrit Hirschfeld
- Professor
- Professor (Full) at Hochschule Bielefeld
Currently updating his Researchgate profile.
About
154
Publications
57,909
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,114
Citations
Introduction
I work as professor for applied psychology, research methods and diagnostics in the department of business (https://www.hsbi.de/wirtschaft). My research on health-related issues is funded largely by BMBF and MWK-NRW. Additionaly, I provide consulting services via my Steinbeis Transfer Center (www.steinbeis.de/su/2322).
Current institution
Hochschule Bielefeld
Current position
- Professor (Full)
Additional affiliations
Position
- Professor (Full)
September 2014 - August 2018
October 2010 - August 2014
Kinderklinik Datteln
Position
- PostDoc Position
Publications
Publications (154)
Introduction: Posting results to clinical trial registers is encouraged and even mandatory for certain trials. This study assessed the feasibility of using structured results data on trial registries over journal articles for meta-analyses using two exemplary approaches. Methods: In study one, we searched ClinicalTrials.gov for studies employing Co...
Patient health literacy is crucial for effective patient–physician communication, and interventions targeting health literacy can use measures based on either actual performance (competence) or self-ratings (confidence). This paper analyzed the development of these measures through three studies. Study 1 reviewed articles describing the development...
'Optimal cutpoints' for binary classification tasks are often established by testing which cutpoint yields the best discrimination, for example the Youden index, in a specific sample. This results in 'optimal' cutpoints that are highly variable and systematically overestimate the out-of-sample performance. To address these concerns, the cutpointr p...
This research, comprising three experiments with a total of 1718 population‐representative participants, investigates the strategies Muslim organizations can utilize to sustain trust and positive perceptions in the direct aftermath of terrorist attacks. It evaluates the effectiveness of different crisis communication strategies as outlined by the S...
Introduction
Intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT) is the best therapy available for children and adolescents affected by severe chronic pain. Psychosocial aftercare (PAC) offered for 6 months after IIPT can improve treatment outcomes for up to 12 months.
Objectives
The current study is the first to explore whether PAC is superior to t...
Background:
Clinical diagnoses determine if and how therapists treat their patients. As misdiagnoses can have severe adverse effects, disseminating evidence-based diagnostic skills into clinical practice is highly important.
Objective:
This study aimed to develop and evaluate a blended learning course in a multicenter cluster randomized controlled...
Objective: This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of two internet-delivered psychological treatments for hypoactive sexual desire dysfunction (HSDD) in women: internet-based cognitive behavioral sex therapy (iCBST) and internet-based mindfulness-based sex therapy (iMBST). Method: Women with HSDD were randomly assigned to one of three groups:...
Background
Men and women differ in the mental health issues they typically face. This study aims to describe gender differences in preferences for mental health treatment options and specifically tries to identify participants who prefer AI-based therapy over traditional face-to-face therapy.
Method
A nationally representative sample of 2,108 part...
Skin cancer claims thousands of lives each year. Early detection through screenings can be life-saving, but what happens when people are excluded from this crucial care-whether by a human or AI? In our pre-registered study (N = 180), we examine how rejection impacts psychological needs and sparks retaliation, building on Williams' need-threat model...
Muslim organizations play important roles in shaping the publics’ reaction to terrorist attacks with Islamist background. The present study uses methods and models from the Situational Crisis Communication Theory to investigate whether and which response strategies affect attitudes toward Muslims and attention to positive and negative information a...
As positive mental health (PMH) has a significant impact on general and mental health, it is an important target for interventions. Cut points are a useful basis for identifying participants with a greater need for such interventions. Representative (n = 9,440) and student (n = 22,833) samples from Germany, Russia, the US, and China were reanalyzed...
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has adverse effects on Russians residing outside of their home country. To test whether a crisis communication strategy by a Russian association can mitigate the adverse effects, a 3 × 2 online experiment with 404 participants representing the general German population was implemented. Crisis communication st...
In this study, we describe the development and validation of a revised Pediatric Chronic Pain Grading (P-CPG) for children aged 8 to 17 years that adds emotional impairment to previously used measures of pain intensity and functional impairment. Such a measure enables the assessment of chronic pain severity in different epidemiological and clinical...
Although negative effects of psychological interventions are suspected to be common, they are rarely investigated. Experts and international guidelines agree that monitoring for negative effects in clinical studies is needed to make psychological interventions safer and to empower patients before they give their consent to participate. Therefore, m...
This study explores the reactions to being denied access to medical services, such as skin cancer screenings, as a form of social exclusion. Early detection of skin cancer is crucial for reducing morbidity, treatment costs, and mortality. However, access to these services is not equally distributed, with statutorily insured individuals facing disad...
Objectives
Changes in pain scores that represent clinically significant differences in children with headaches are necessary for study design and interpretation of findings reported in studies. We aimed to determine changes in pain scores associated with a minimum clinically significant difference (MCSD), ideal clinically significant difference (IC...
Background
The dual-factor model of mental health posits that mental health and mental illness constitute two distinct axes; accordingly the model identifies four mental health groups: (1) complete mental health, (2) troubled, (3) vulnerable, (4) symptomatic but content. Yet, only a few studies investigated effectiveness of therapy on both dimensio...
BACKGROUND
Clinical diagnoses determine if and how therapists treat their patients. As misdiagnoses can have severe adverse effects, disseminating evidence-based diagnostic skills into clinical practice is highly important.
OBJECTIVE
Therefore, we developed and evaluated a blended learning course in a multicenter cluster randomized trial.
METHODS...
Background
Clinical diagnoses determine if and how therapists treat their patients. As misdiagnoses can have severe adverse effects, disseminating evidence-based diagnostic skills into clinical practice is highly important.
Objective
This study aimed to develop and evaluate a blended learning course in a multicenter cluster randomized controlled t...
An online experiment will be conducted to investigate how subjects react to social exclusion in health care services (i.e., skin cancer screening). In a vignette, the test subjects should imagine that they discover an unusual mole on their body. They are worried that it could be skin cancer and want a medical checkup. Subjects are told that the loc...
Background
The registration of studies, especially in the case of clinical trials, is required by the declaration of Helsinki and the policies of various scientific journals. However, numerous analyses have found considerable discrepancies between published articles and accompanying trial registrations. The aim of this study is to assess such discr...
Background: Although earlier studies concluded that clinicians’ prototypes of
patients with mental disorders can influence diagnostic decisions, it remains unclear how presumably more or less prototypical features were identified in these studies. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to empirically identify therapists’ prototypes of major d...
Objective: Clinical diagnoses determine if and how therapists treat their patients. As misdiagnoses can have severe adverse effects, disseminating evidence-based diagnostic skills into clinical practice is highly important. Therefore, we developed and evaluated a blended learning course in a multicenter cluster randomized trial.
Method: Undergrad...
Objective: As positive mental health (PMH) has a significant impact on general and mental health, it is an important target for interventions. Cut points are a useful basis for identifying participants with a greater need for such interventions.
Method: Representative (n=15,370) and student (n=22,833) samples from Germany, Russia, the US, and Chi...
Perceiving one’s own life as meaningful is associated with mental health and well-being. Yet, psychotherapeutic interventions to enhance the experience of meaning have not been sufficiently evaluated in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The aim of this study was to pilot a group therapy to increase meaning and to evaluate its feasi...
BACKGROUND
There is a great interest in using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen for skin cancer. This is fueled by a rising incidence of skin cancer and an increasing scarcity of trained dermatolo-gists. AI systems, capable of identifying melanoma, could save lives, enable immediate ac-cess to screenings, reduce unnecessary care and healthcare...
Background
There is great interest in using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen for skin cancer. This is fueled by a rising incidence of skin cancer and an increasing scarcity of trained dermatologists. AI systems capable of identifying melanoma could save lives, enable immediate access to screenings, and reduce unnecessary care and health care...
Various methods are available to determine optimal cutpoints for diagnostic measures. Unfortunately, many authors fail to report the precision at which these optimal cutpoints are being estimated and use sample sizes that are not suitable to achieve an adequate precision. The aim of the present study is to evaluate methods to estimate the variance...
Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) guides responses of corporations in crises. We tested how COVID-19 related crisis communication strategies affect trust in mayors and the acceptance of behavioral measures. A total of 561 participants (53% female) with a mean age of 50 years took part in an online experiment in which we systematically...
In the field of human–computer interaction, the concept of visual aesthetics gained popularity after researchers started to recognize its merits and effects on user experience. Yet, no proper instrument exists to assess the visual aesthetics of websites that are intended for users who speak Arabic as their native language. As such, the aim of this...
Background:
For pediatric chronic pain patients, intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT) is a well-established treatment. The treatment's short-term effectiveness can be improved by an additive psychosocial aftercare (PAC). However, neither the program's long-term effectiveness nor the patients in particular need have been investigated y...
Introduction
Analyses of clinical trial registries (CTRs) offer insights into methodological problems of published research studies, e.g., non-publication and outcome-switching. Here, we use CTRs as a tool to evaluate clinical studies conducted in Germany and test how their registration quality is associated with time and structural factors: Coordi...
Importance
Severe chronic pediatric pain causes individual suffering and significantly affects social functioning and psychological well-being. For children with high pain severity, intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT) is a well-established treatment. However, across specialized centers, it is not sufficient for all patients.
Objectiv...
User Experience wird oftmals anhand von Befragungen mittels standardisierter Fragebögen erfasst. Allerdings bringen dabei gerade quantitative Online-Datenerhebungen den großen Nachteil mit sich, dass die Umstände, unter denen die Befragten an der Untersuchung teilnehmen zumeist nur schwer zu kontrollieren sind. Insbesondere ist unklar, unter welche...
The vast majority of the German population uses the internet on a regular basis. Past research has shown that depressiveness has a negative influence on the user experience of websites, which in turn is an important predictor for the success of web content. The present study investigates the influence of worrying and intolerance of uncertainty on w...
Registries of clinical trials are a potential source for scientometric analysis of medical research and serve important functions for the research community and the public at large. Clinical trials that recruit patients in Germany are usually registered in the German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS) or in international registries such as ClinicalTri...
Objectives
To identify self-reported pain scores that best represent categories of no pain, mild, moderate, and severe pain in children, and a pain score that accurately represents a child’s perceived need for medication (PNM), i.e. a minimum pain score at which a child would want an analgesic.
Study design
Prospective cross-sectional cohort study...
Introduction: The communication patterns of commercial organizations are generally guided by Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), but the impact of different crisis communication strategies for public messaging on COVID-19 has not been thoroughly examined. As such, we test how crisis communication strategies affect trust in mayors and th...
"Optimal cutpoints" for binary classification tasks are often established by testing which cutpoint yields the best discrimination, for example the Youden index, in a specific sample. This results in "optimal" cutpoints that are highly variable and systematically overestimate the out-of-sample performance. To address these concerns, the cutpointr p...
Introduction
: Patient reported outcomes are central to the evaluation of behavioral, drug, or somatic interventions focusing depression. Continuous measures are mostly interpreted with cut points that serve as inclusion criteria and define remission. The present review provides an overview of measures (BDI; BDI-II; CESD; HADS; HAMD-17; MADRS; PHQ-...
Background:
The Sexual Interest and Desire Inventory-Female (SIDI-F) is a clinician-administered scale that allows for a comprehensive assessment of symptoms related to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Dysfunction (HSDD). As self-report questionnaires may facilitate less socially desirable responding and as time and resources are scarce in many clinical a...
More than one-third of adolescents experience recurrent headaches. Usually, these headaches are of primary origin and modulated by different biological and psychosocial factors. While parents are often consulted in scientific research and medical care about the nature of their child’s headache, it is unclear to what extent parents and their childre...
Background:
Although pediatric chronic pain is common, it is not yet clear which individuals with chronic pain are likely to seek health care for their pain. The aims of this study were to summarize the current evidence of characteristics of children and adolescents with chronic pain who consult a physician or use medication for their pain. Additi...
Background: The Sexual Interest and Desire Inventory Female (SIDI-F) is a clinician-administered scale that allows for a comprehensive assessment of symptoms related to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Dysfunction (HSDD). As self-report questionnaires may facilitate less socially desirable responding and as time and resources are scarce in many clinical an...
In digital media and on the World Wide Web, content is king. As such, users’ subjective perceptions of content can influence a variety of their evaluations, thereby altering their attitudes and behavioral outcomes. Thus, users’ content perceptions need to be assessed using a valid measure, but this often has to be done while keeping the survey time...
Introduction:
Generic measures of health-related quality of life are important in pediatrics. Here, we try to establish optimal cut points for the self-report and parental-report versions of the KIDSCREEN-10.
Method:
We re-analyzed data from the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS) study. In total,...
We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and la...
The course of maternal repetitive negative thinking at the transition to motherhood and early mother–infant interactions: Is there a link? – ADDENDUM - Dana Müller, Tobias Teismann, Gerrit Hirschfeld, Norbert Zmyj, Sabrina Fuths, Silja Vocks, Silvia Schneider, Sabine Seehagen
Scores of different evaluation measures resulting from website tests are difficult to interpret without comparative data. Benchmarks and optimal cut points provide such interpretation aids. Benchmarks are usually built with test score means based on a tested pool of comparable websites. Optimal cut points are calculated with an external criterion u...
When planning studies to evaluate websites practitioners need to answer two central questions: (1) Which instrument should be used? (2) How many users should be queried? While the answer to the first question depends on the goal of the specific evaluation, the second question can also be answered in relation to fundamental psychometric relationship...
Mindfulness-based interventions are effective at improving sexual dysfunctions in women, yet the mechanisms of action are less clear. Our objective was to investigate the impact of three mindfulness exercises on women’s sexual response. Forty-nine women participated in a laboratory session involving a series of 5-minute exercises and erotic films....
Objective:
Long-term follow-ups several years after receiving cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are scarce and most of the existing literature describes follow-up data of randomized-controlled trials. Thus, very little is known about the long-term effects of CBT in routine care.
Methods:
We investigated psychological functioning in a sample of...
Simulation studies are helpful in testing novel statistical methods. From a computational perspective, they constitute embarrassingly parallel tasks. We describe parallelization techniques in the programming language R that can be used on Amazon's cloud‐based infrastructure. After a short conceptual overview of the parallelization techniques in R,...
Introduction
The Beck Depression Inventory revised (BDI-II) is widely used tool to screen for depression. The aim of the present study was to systematically review and synthesize studies that determined optimal cut points for the BDI-II.
Method
We identified 27 studies that tried to identify optimal cut points for the BDI-II. Study quality was ass...
Zusammenfassung
Die zunehmende Digitalisierung beeinflusst die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Unternehmen, wodurch diese zur Sicherung ihrer Existenz Geschäftsmodelle überprüfen und ggf. anpassen. Transparenter werdende Wertschöpfungsketten erhöhen gleichzeitig den Druck Unternehmensziele im Sinne einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung (z. B. Reduktion der CO2-E...
Background
Identifying changes in pain score associated with clinically meaningful outcomes is necessary when using self‐report measures to assess pain in children. We aimed to determine the changes in pain score associated with a minimum clinically significant difference (MCSD), ideal clinically significant difference (ICSD), and patient‐perceived...
Users access the Internet not only to pursue specific goals (e.g. searching for information), but also to browse through content in a more exploratory fashion. The current study experimentally manipulates participants’ tasks in order to investigate how goal-directed (searching) or exploratory (browsing) website activities moderate the impact of key...
The present study evaluates a brief, cross-cultural scale that maps a wide range of social resources, useful in large-scale assessments of perceived social support. The Brief Perceived Social Support Questionnaire (Fragebogen zur Sozialen Unterstützung Kurzform mit sechs Items, F-SozU K-6) was examined in representative and university student sampl...
Potential long-term associations between repetitive negative thinking and mother-infant interactions have received little attention. The current longitudinal study including N = 62 mother-infant dyads investigated both maternal and infant behavior in face-to-face interactions as a function of pre- and postnatal maternal repetitive negative thinking...
Positive factors are increasingly recognized in the field of psychology, however, few studies have investigated the longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) and reciprocal associations of positive core constructs, such as happiness, life satisfaction and positive mental health. This study evaluated the LMI of these constructs over four years in a...
Checking behavior (CB) occurs in a variety of disorders such as obsessive-compulsive (OCD), body dysmorphic (BDD), illness anxiety (IA), and panic disorder (PD), as well as anorexia (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Etiological models of these disorders – with the exception of those for PD – postulate that CB mainly occurs in situations characterized...
Background
Parental reactions to their child’s pain can comprise cognitive-affective and behavioral responses. Dysfunctional responses like parental catastrophizing may lead to an aggravation of the child’s pain.
Objectives
Aims of the online-based study were (1) to psychometrically evaluate existing questionnaires into cognitive-affective (Pain C...
Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die Merkmale guter User Experience (UX) Fragebögen anhand von zentralen Kriterien heraus. Neben den klassischen Gütekriterien, insbesondere Reliabilität und Validität, werden hierbei die Grundlagen eines Verfahrens sowie die praktische Anwendung diskutiert. Eine beispielhafte Illustration erfolgt anhand etablierter UX...
Zusammenfassung Inhalte sind zentral im Internet-und damit auch deren Wahrnehmung und Bewertung durch die Nutzer-Innen. Der hier vorgestellte Web-CLIC-Fragebogen erfasst zentrale Facetten dieser Inhaltswahrneh-mung. In einer Übersicht wird die Konstruktion und Validierung des Fragebogens basierend auf einer Serie von sieben Studien mit insgesamt n...
The Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI)-18 is a widely-used tool to assess changes in general distress in patients despite an ongoing debate about its factorial structure and lack of evidence for longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI). We investigated BSI-18 scores from 1,081 patients from an outpatient clinic collected after the 2nd, 6th, 10th, 18th,...
Objective:
The German version of the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI-G) is a validated measure for the detection of social anxiety disorder (SAD). The aim of the present study was to develop optimal cut points (OC) for remission and response to treatment for the SPAI-G.
Methods:
We used Receiver Operating Characteristic methods and boo...
Fear of pain plays an important role in the maintenance of chronic pain. It may be reduced through exposure therapy. This 2-arm parallel samples randomized controlled trial aimed to investigate whether interoceptive exposure (IE) therapy enhances reductions in fear of pain (primary outcome), pain (pain intensity, pain-related disability, and school...
Content is of primary importance in the World Wide Web. In particular, subjective perceptions of content are known to influence a variety of user evaluations, thereby altering attitudes and behavioral outcomes. Thus, it is essential that individually experienced facets of content can be adequately assessed. In a series of seven studies, we create,...
The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) is the most frequently used instrument to assess social anxiety disorder (SAD) in clinical research and practice. Both a self‐reported (LSAS‐SR) and a clinician‐administered (LSAS‐CA) version are available. The aim of the present study was to define optimal cut‐off (OC) scores for remission and response to...
Background
Chemotherapy-induced Peripheral Neuropathy (CIPN) of large-fibers affects up to 20% of survivors of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). We aimed to describe small-fiber toxicity and pain sensitization in this group.
Methods
In a cross-sectional, bicentric study we assessed 46 survivors of pediatric ALL (Mean age: 5.7 ± 3.5 yea...
Introduction:
Many patients with cerebral palsy (CP) suffer chronic pain as one of the most limiting factors in their quality of life. In CP patients, pain mechanisms are not well understood, and pain therapy remains a challenge. Quantitative sensory testing (QST) might provide unique information about the functional status of the somatosensory sy...
We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and la...
ERP Data
Grand averages for the individual participants
Recent theoretical models suggest that repetitive negative thinking might be a key mechanism explaining the negative effects of maternal psychopathology on mother–infant relations. While an emerging body of research largely supports this idea, the relative importance of differences in the trajectory of repetitive negative thinking during and after...
Research into positive aspects of the psyche is growing as psychologists learn more about the protective role of positive processes in the development and course of mental disorders, and about their substantial role in promoting mental health. With increasing globalization, there is strong interest in studies examining positive constructs across cu...
Objectives:
The aims of this study were to define the Faces Pain Scale-Revised (FPS-R) and Color Analog Scale (CAS) scores associated with no pain, mild pain, moderate pain, and severe pain in children with acute pain, and to identify differences based on age, sex, and ethnicity.
Methods:
We conducted a prospective observational study in 2 pedia...
Background
Families with lower socioeconomic status (SES) often face problems with gaining access to health care services. Information is scarce on the relationship between SES and health care delivery for children suffering from chronic pain. Methods
Families presenting to a specialized pain center (N = 1,001) provided information on ‘household in...
Suicide is a major cause of death in adulthood and specifically in patients suffering from mental illnesses. The Depressive Symptom Inventory Suicidality Subscale (DSI-SS) is widely used to detect and prevent suicidal ideation. The aim of the present study was to determine optimal cut points for the DSI-SS in different populations. We analysed the...
Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Bisherige Studien zeigen, dass internetbasierte Interventionen kurzfristig die Veranderungsmotivation bei Essstorungen verbessern konnen. Zur Stabilitat dieser Effekte ist jedoch wenig bekannt. Fragestellung: Wie entwickeln sich die Veranderungsmotivation, die Essstorungspsychopathologie und das Selbstwer...
The assessment of somatosensory function is a cornerstone of research and clinical practice in neurology. Recent initiatives have developed novel protocols for quantitative sensory testing (QST). Application of these methods led to intriguing findings, such as the presence lower pain-thresholds in healthy children compared to healthy adolescents. I...
Background: The aim of this study was to characterize postmortem organ donation attitudes in various German cohorts. Material/Methods: Employees of 2 German cities and 2 German university hospitals, employees of a German automobile enterprise, and members of a German Medical Society were administered a questionnaire about postmortem organ and tissu...
Die Ausbildung im Fach Wirtschaftsmathematik ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil verschiedener Studiengänge. Häufig entstehen dabei unterschiedliche Aufgabensammlungen, die sowohl in der Notation als auch im Format (handschriftlich / digital) variieren. Der Pflegeaufwand solcher Aufgabensammlungen ist sehr hoch und es mangelt häufig an neuen Aufgaben. Du...
Usability is a core construct of website evaluation and inherently defined as interactive. Yet, when analysing first impressions of websites, expected usability, i.e., before use, is of interest. Here we investigate to what extend ratings of expected usability are related to (a) experienced usability, i.e., ratings after use, and (b) objective usab...
Pediatric debilitating chronic pain is a severe health problem, often requiring complex interventions such as intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT). Research is lacking regarding the effectiveness of IIPT for children. The objective was to systematically review studies evaluating the effects of IIPT.
Cochrane, Medline/Ovid, PsycInfo/OVI...
There is little knowledge regarding the association between psychological factors and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) in children. Specifically, it is not known which factors precipitate CRPS and which result from the ongoing painful disease.
OBJECTIVES: To examine symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as the experience of stressful life...
Background. Recurrent pain is a common experience in childhood, but only few children with recurrent pain attend a physician. Previous studies yielded conflicting findings with regard to predictors of health care utilization in children with recurrent pain.
Methods. The present study analyzes data from the German Health Interview and Examination Su...
This review aimed to synthesize the current evidence on the effectiveness of invasive treatments for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) in children and adolescents. Studies on children and adolescents with CRPS that evaluated the effects of invasive treatment were identified in PubMed (search March 2013).
Thirty-six studies met the inclusion cr...
Objectives
The objective was to determine the minimum and ideal clinically significant differences (MCSD, ICSD) in pain intensity in children for the Faces Pain Scale–Revised (FPS-R) and the Color Analog Scale (CAS) and to identify any differences in these estimates based on patient characteristics.Methods
This was a prospective study of children a...
Subjective perceptions of websites can be reliably measured with questionnaires. But it is unclear how such scores should be interpreted in practice, e.g. is an aesthetics score of 4 points on a 7-point-scale satisfactory? The current paper introduces a ROC-based methodology to establish meaningful cut points for the VisAWI (Visual Aesthetics of We...
AimsTo assess the diagnostic utility of a novel abbreviated monofilament test in comparison with the tuning fork test to detect diabetic peripheral neuropathy in children.MethodsA total of 88 children with Type 1 diabetes mellitus were screened for diabetic peripheral neuropathy using the monofilament test and the tuning fork. Nerve conduction stud...
Researchers often use exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to develop and refine questionnaires assessing the Big Five personality traits. We use sequential sampling and bootstrapping to determine the number of participants needed to yield stable loading patterns for the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the International Personality Item Pool Big Five mea...
Aim: Empirical studies in medicine – and most other fields of study - yield results that are uncertain to a certain degree. Medical research on interventions has made tremendous leaps forward by quantifying and reporting this uncertainty using p-values and confidence intervals. In contrast to this, most diagnostic studies that determine optimal cut...
Aim: Empirical studies in medicine – and most other fields of study - yield results that are uncertain to a certain degree. Medical research on interventions has made tremendous leaps forward by quantifying and reporting this uncertainty using p-values and confidence intervals. In contrast to this, most diagnostic studies that determine optimal cut...
Background : Recurrent pain is a common experience in childhood, but only few children with recurrent pain attend a physician. Previous small-scale studies yielded conflicting findings with regard to predictors of health care utilization in children with recurrent pain. Methods : The present study analyzes a subset of the data from the German Healt...
Questions
Question (1)
Many social sciences (Psychology, Business, Sociology, etc.) require their undergraduates to learn some basic quantitative methods (aka stats). This is often coupled with learning to use a software. In psychology SPSS has been the method of choice because many believe that the graphical user interface makes it easier for students to learn, while programming languages such as R are too hard.
I wonder if this is backed by any hard evidence? Working in medicine for some time I would prefer some randomized controlled trials, but for starters anything else would be great.
The outcome I would be most interested in is are they able to apply the methods on their own problems?
Best
Gerrit