Compare and Contrast #1: Measuring a Behavior

Due Monday September 19, beginning of class

The purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking critically about how to measure a health-related behavior of interest to you.

• Pick a health-related behavior that you think is important to measure in the field, either to improve health research or to create more effective health interventions. Be specific about the behavior. For instance, instead of selecting "exercise," you might consider focusing on "moderate or greater physical activity," "type of activity," "sedentary activity," etc.
• Find examples of instruments used to measure the behavior from the research literature. You will look for two types of instruments:
  • "Traditional" instruments. These are likely to be paper-based instruments. Search for research articles in the medical or psychology literature (see PubMed or PsychInfo databases) where people have needed to the measure the behavior, and then figure out researchers have done so by finding the citations to the instruments used. Then find the papers that describe the instruments themselves. Gather as much information you can about each instruments. You are likely to find that there is no single instrument, but rather many that might be used. If this is the case, try to determine 3-4 which seem to be commonly accepted in recent articles.
  • "Emerging" instruments. These are new instruments that are likely to use new technologies to measure the behavior. Search for research articles in the medical or psychology literature, but also the engineering and computer science literature (e.g., IEEE, ACM Digital Library, and Springer databases). Find at least one but ideally several examples of new ways of measuring the behavior.
• Make a list of all the research articles you have found. For each article, provide all the reference information for the paper (title, author, journal, pages, etc.) and, if it is available online, a link to the article. For articles not available online, provide a hardcopy if possible. In 2-3 sentences for each, explain why you think the measurement technique is important.
• Pick one "traditional" and one "emerging" instrument that you think are particularly important, well-validated, or innovative. Study each instrument and compare and contrast them. In particular, think about what each does better or worse than the other.

In no more than 1 page (11 point font), provide the following:

• Your name, email, department, and year in school
• A few sentences on why it is important to measure the behavior you picked and why you picked that behavior
• What is easy and what is difficult about measuring the behavior
• A succinct summary comparing/contrasting the two measurement strategies you selected. Use the two papers you identified to help you think carefully about what would make field assessment of the behavior challenging and what might be necessary to overcome those difficulties.

In addition to bringing a hardcopy of your 1-page write-up to class, send an email of the PDF to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].compareconstrast1.pdf.