New Project - Valuing health benefits for children and adolescents: qualitative research examining the impact of perspective and respondents' priorities around adult and child health

HEDS have started work on a new project which will work on providing important information about why people's values differ when valuing child and adolescent health states. This will involve exploring the impact of framing of perspective, elicitation technique, and wider views around child and adult health. This work will be informative for researchers and policy makers around how to elicit and interpret utility values for child and adolescent health states.

The project will undertake qualitative research to:
a) Better understand how framing around the perspective of health states impacts on values for child and adolescent health states elicited from members of the UK adult general population.
b) Understand how this is impacted by general attitudes to child and adult health and the prioritisation of child versus adult health. 

The project team are:
Donna Rowen, Phil Powell, Aki Tsuchiya and John Brazier

The research is funded by EuroQol Group and is taking place at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with Oliver Rivero-Arias at the University of Oxford. 

Applying GRADE-CERQual to qualitative evidence synthesis findings - A new series of papers

ScHARR has contributed to a series of papers published in "Implementation Science" which provides guidance on how to apply the GRADE-CERQual approach. CERQual helps assess how much confidence to place in findings from qualitative evidence syntheses.

Findings from syntheses of qualitative research can help provide evidence on people’s views of health and social care issues. This includes whether interventions are acceptable to the people affected by them, about the feasibility of interventions, and about a range of other factors that are likely to influence implementation. Such syntheses are being used increasingly to inform decisions about health and social policies. The GRADE-CERQual (‘Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research’) approach helps decision makers use these syntheses by indicating how much confidence they should place in each finding.

CERQual group

Co-author Andrew Booth, from HEDS said: “This series provides timely guidance for CERQual users on how to apply the approach. CERQual is already offering decision makers across the world a way to understand how much confidence to place in findings from systematic reviews of qualitative evidence. This can be seen within a bigger picture of increased use of qualitative evidence at a national and international level.”

CERQual has been developed by an international team of qualitative researchers, as a subgroup of the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) Working Group (www.gradeworkinggroup.org), with funding from the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, Cochrane, Norad, the Research Council of Norway and WHO. Co-author Claire Glenton notes: “We encourage those keen to support the further development of CERQual to join our subgroup via our website (www.cerqual.org).”

The GRADE-CERQual papers are freely available on the Implementation Science website at 

https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/supplements/volume-13-supplement-1

The Application of Psychometrics for Measuring Health Outcomes and Quality of Life - Basic/Intermediate (Part 1) - 2 1/2 days course - Monday, 13th - Wednesday, 15th February 2017

Dr Anju Keetharuth from HEDS will be leading the first part of a two part course on Application of Psychometrics for Measuring Health Outcomes and Quality of Life. It will cover the core psychometric and statistical methods used in scale construction and the development of multi-item patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Sessions will be delivered by ScHARR staff Professor John Brazier, Anju and external staff Georgina Jones - Leeds Beckett University) and Jakob Bue Bjorner - Optum Patient Insights, who have an international reputation in psychometric methods and questionnaire development, analysis and interpretation. The course will be interactive and practical. Sessions will be delivered using lectures and individual and small group practical exercises using real world examples.

Who will benefit from this course?

The course content is aimed at participants with no prior knowledge of psychometrics or those who wish to refresh and gain more theoretical and practical knowledge in this area. The course content is set at a basic/intermediate level. It will focus on classical methods of test construction and test of differential item function, but will also provide an introduction to modern psychometric methods such as Rasch models, item response theory and factor analysis for categorical data. It will be relevant to researchers, students, clinicians and other health care professionals and members of the pharmaceutical industry interested in using or developing PROMs.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course participants should be able to:

• Identify the key stages involved in scale construction and development
• Understand the qualitative process involved in the development of a PROM and item generation
• Describe the different ways of scoring and scaling a PROM and the theory underpinning these
• Understand exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analysis and be able to carry out EFA using SPSS
• Understand what is meant by reliability, validity, and responsiveness and be able to analyse and interpret these using SPSS
• Explore the above concepts using datasets from a range of existing disease-specific and generic PROMs
• Be aware of the use of different software other than SPSS where applicable.

Course Materials

All course materials will be provided on a USB together with hard copies of handouts/exercises as required for the course.

Participants are asked to supply their own Laptop throughout the course. Participants will work on laptops using SPSS during the course.  Working knowledge of SPSS would be beneficial but is not essential. If you do not have access to SPSS on your laptop, then a link to download will be provided prior to starting the course.

Further Learning (Advanced Part 2)

An advanced course will be run immediately following on from this course (Wednesday, 15th - Friday, 17th February 2017) which will cover Rasch models, item response theory, confirmatory factor analysis and factor analysis for categorical data in more detail using MPlus software. 

Dates

PART 1 - 2.5-day course: Monday, 13th - Wednesday, 15th February 2017

PART 2 - 2.5-day course: Wednesday, 15th - Friday, 17th February 2017

Times:

Start: Day 1 (Monday, 13th February 2017) - 9am for Registration & Refreshments with a prompt course start of 9:30am

Finish: Day 3 (Wednesday, 15th February 2017) - 1pm (with lunch provided)

FEES - Part 1

£990 - Early Bird Fee - For bookings received on or before Sunday, 11th December 2016

£1,290 - Standard Fee - For bookings received on or after Monday, 12th December 2016

FEES - Part 2

£840 - Early Bird Fee - For bookings received on or before Sunday, 11th December 2016

£1,140 - Standard Fee - For bookings received on or after Monday, 12th December 2016

FEES - Discounted Full Course

£1,540 - Early Bird Fee - For bookings received on or  before Sunday, 11th December 2016

£1,850 - Standard Fee - For bookings received on or after Monday, 12th December 2016

NB:  All fees do not include any accommodation.  We do have a preferential rate at Halifax Hall for our delegates (subject to availability).  Booking details and contact information will be automatically provided upon receipt of your online booking (a booking reference will be given along with the name and contact details of the person this should be booked directlywith, to ensure you receive our preferential rate of £65 per night/room).

Booking and Payment

Halifax Hall

Provisional bookings are now being accepted. Please email scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk to reserve your place. You will then be contacted when the course has gone live on our Online Store, where all our bookings and payments are initially processed.

Bookings are processed via our Online Store. Payment is by Credit/Debit Card or PayPal. If your employer is paying your fees and they would prefer to be invoiced, then please select the Invoice Option for the course and ensure that all invoice details are provided (contact email address, full address, purchase order number etc) and also forward a copy of the Purchase Order to scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk. Your booking will not be completed until all information has been provided.

If you have any queries relating to fees and payment, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Venue

Halifax Hall Hotel and Conference Centre, Endcliffe Vale Rd, Sheffield, S10 3ER.

http://www.halifaxhall.co.uk/

Contact

For further information please do not hesitate to contact us via email at scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk

or call +44 (0)114 222 2968.