[Colloq] Thu 11/20 4-5: PHI Speaker Series Presentation: In Vivo Assessments of Human Behavior & Health: A Methodological Perspective

[Biron, Jessica]

Please join us for the talk in the Personal Health Informatics Fall Speaker Series. 

Thursday 11/20, 4-5PM, Room 105 BK (Behrakis Health Center) Open to the public. 

In Vivo Assessments of Human Behavior & Health: A Methodological Perspective 

Mariya Shiyko , Ph.D. 


Assistant Professor
Department of Counseling and Applied Educational Psychology 

Bouvé College of Health Sciences
Northeastern University
Abstract: 

In social & behavioral sciences, intensive longitudinal data are frequently collected with mobile phones that prompt participants to respond to a series of questions that focus on momentary experiences. Assessments include reports of environment (e.g., Right now, are there in a company of other smokers?), behaviors (e.g., Are you smoking right now?), and related psychological constructs (e.g., On a scale from 0 to 10, how much do you want to smoke right now?). Collected data contains missed assessments, irregular spacing of observations, unique scheduling of assessments across participants, and complex relational patterns between variables. The talk with describe two methodological approaches, the time-varying effect modeling (TVEM) and varying-coefficient regression (VCR) that were developed to address challenges of intensive longitudinal data. Both methods can be used to investigate dynamics of relationships between variables expressed as parameter functions that change continuously over time (or another important contextual domain). Empirical examples from smoking-cessation studies will be used to highlight uniqueness of the analytical methods and their contributions to smoking-cessation research. 

Upcoming speakers : 

December 4
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Associate Professor
College of Arts, Media, and Design
College of Computer and Information Sciences Northeastern University 

Hosted by the Northeastern University Personal Health Informatics Program .