HSRPP Conference 2013
Last week (9th & 10th May) I was in not so sunny Preston at the Health Services Research and Pharmacy Practice conference. It was a great conference, and I got to meet lots of very friendly researchers and academics. Including a a colleague Jane and I have been collaborating with in Canada. At this conference I gave a talk on some of my PhD research which found that perceptions of time pressure were related to poorer performance at accuracy checking for final year pharmacy students. Click this link for my HSRPP 2013 Conference Paper Presentation which includes the data for this study and you can download the conference paper abstract here if you have access. In the presentation there are some cool stats on community pharmacists’ workload in this presentation. Actually they are not so cool when you realise the implications. Plus some cartoons which I doodled on my ipad one afternoon when I was trying to avoid writing chapters for my thesis.
I also ran a workshop on qualitative research methods for beginners which was well attended and was a repeat of last years workshop from which we got great feedback. Hopefully the feedback on this course is just as good.
Article in the Pharmaceutical Journal
I am very excited that an article about our blank brain entries has been published in the Pharmaceutical Journal! This is the most widely read journal by pharmacists in all settings, so it is great news that so many pharmacists will be able to read about the work Jane, Marjorie and I have been doing, and the fantastic blank brain entries that pharmacists have been sending in. If you would like to read the article you can read it here.
CMHP Conference 2012
I was very pleased to be invited to hold to workshops on questionnaire design for the Annual College of Mental Health Pharmacy Conference. I focussed on the cognitive aspects of survey design as they are not taught as widely as the standard rules for constructing questions and questionnaires. I wanted to give those who came to the workshops a method or methods to take home with them that they could use in the future, so it was a very practical class. Although I can take no credit for any of the methods outlined as they were all developed by other researchers, and so I focussed on my experiences of using these techniques and why I thought they would be useful for other people who work with questionnaires. You can download my slides below if they are of any use to you. However, you will notice that a lot of the slides are reproductions of those used in my presentation at the HSRPP 2012 conference which are also below.
HSRPP 2012
On 23rd & 24th April 2012 Jane and I attended the Health Services Research and Pharmacy Practice Conference at University College Cork. I am happily still in Cork as I decided to spend a few days relaxing and soaking up all the beautiful South Coast scenery. However, I promised I would upload the slides from my presentation in case anyone wanted to download them and use them.
I presented on a fairly well-known method called the think aloud technique (or protocol analysis)…I used it for the first time last year and it is a method that I am very excited about (because it is so useful).
For those of you that were kind enough to listen to me talk or for anyone who is interested in this method here are the Thinking Aloud Presentation slides. I hope you find them useful/interesting, but remember I am still learning about this technique – and so please follow the references on the slides for more expertly detailed information on this technique! If you use the think aloud technique yourselves please let me know how you get on, it is the first time I’ve used this method, so I would love to learn how other people get on with it/if they found similar types of response issues / different ones! Or if you know of better ways to pilot questionnaires / or code the eventual think aloud transcripts let me know as I am always looking to learn / try new research methods.
Also, if you are wanting to learn more about this technique in addition to the references on the presentation there are a tonne of references that I didn’t include because of space. You can find a wealth of papers on this technique if you use this search term: “cognitive aspects of survey methodology”.
I’ll write a proper post about the conference later because I am off to visit Waterford & Cobh now. I am trying to make the most of our last 2 days in Ireland.
