A breakthrough for greater accuracy

“With optional RRT, a researcher will not know if a particular participant provided an unscrambled response. However, the pool of survey answers now contains unscrambled responses as well as scrambled responses, which, with correct modeling, allows the researcher to estimate the average response to the research question with greater accuracy. There’s better precision. I’ve written many papers related to it. All my PhD students, by and large, have worked on optional RRT models. It opened up a new area of research, not only for my students but for many other researchers. We have shown that these optional models can be used in the field and that they work very well. With any RRT model you can think of, there is going to be an advantage in using the optional version of that model.“

Real-world applications

“I enjoy collaborating. For example, I did a study with nurse researchers at Cone Health that won the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses Journal Writers Contest award in 2017. That study was about patients who develop bedsores after surgery. Another recent one was with the School of Nursing, looking at the negative impact of presentism on patient care and the economy. Now we all know what absenteeism is. You are absent from work. But presentism is: you are present at work, but you’re not really working. Maybe you’re in pain or experiencing depression. Nurses who are suffering with depression or pain often end up making mistakes. Baseline cost estimates indicate the increased falls and medication errors caused by presenteeism cost $1,346 per North Carolina registered nurse and just under $2 billion for the United States each year.

“That joy in collaborating extends to my work with graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduates don’t have to do research, so motivating them to do that work is particularly satisfying. My undergraduates have published RRT papers about stimulant use among college students, STD prevalence, and more. Many have gone on to graduate work, both here with me and at other outstanding programs across the country. One of the most rewarding things is seeing these students progress in life.

“I also enjoy consulting. In one case, I represented a biotech company whose product was rejected by the FDA. We convinced the FDA the approach they used to test compliance of certain diagnostics devices needed modification.”

Helping people in a real way

“With each research project, I try to understand the underlying story as much as possible. For example, with the bedsore study, those nurse researchers are better educated now as to what can lead to a problem, and they can take better action. In another study, we tried to figure out how to reduce the use of narcotics after caesarean deliveries at Cone Health. We learned that mothers who breastfed their babies felt less need for narcotics compared to those who did not breastfeed. It’s called skin-to-skin therapy. This was a very recent study, but the fact that it has concrete implications is very satisfying. One of my graduate students was part of that study. She won the best paper award at a conference in India for the work, and she presented it at a conference in Boston. From a research point of view, those are exciting things. But when you can understand the underlying story, you feel even more excited, because this research has a direct impact on people’s lives.”