Methods Core Projects

The transdisciplinary Methods Core Team's collective value is greater than the sum of its parts, creating new collaborations and synergies across Center research projects needed for the scale-up of effective interventions to reduce premature mortality in serious mental illness. The Methods Core includes research surrounding intervention development, measurement, implementation strategy development, and healthcare financing and policy.

The Methods Core Team will support all ALACRITY Center research activities and contribute to four areas of methods innovation that will yield practical and/or scientific products to inform future scale-up of physical health interventions in community mental health settings:

1. Evaluating Avatar-Assisted Training and Assessment of Motivational Interviewing, led by Arlene Dalcin.
2. Contributing to advanced quantitative methods to support intervention scale-up; including: Informing the design of Sequential, Multiple Assignment, Randomized Trials (SMARTs); Evaluating the heterogeneity of treatment effects; and Assessing the generalizability of trials to target populations. Led by Elizabeth Stuart with Amy Kilbourne and Nae-Yuh Wang.
3. Building a systems model to characterize health impacts of implementing evidence-based interventions to decrease cardiovascular risk in persons with serious mental illness. Led by Tak Igusa with Elizabeth Stuart and Nae-Yuh Wang.

Investigators 

• Elizabeth Stuart, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator
• Nae-Yuh Wang, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator
• Arlene Dalcin, RD, MS, Co-Investigator
• Gail Daumit, MD, MHS, Co-Investigator
• Joseph Gennusa, PhD, RD, LDN - Project Director
• Takeru Igusa, PhD, Co-Investigator
• Amy Kilbourne, PhD, MPH, Co-Investigator
• Jill Marsteller, PhD, MPP, Co-Investigator
• Beth McGinty, PhD, MS, Co-Investigator
• Anping Xie, PhD, Co-Investigator

Publications

• Designing Practical Motivational Interviewing Training for Mental Health Practitioners Implementing Behavioral Lifestyle Interventions: Protocol for 3 Pilot Intervention Studies (Dalcin et al., JMIR Research Protocols, 2023)
• Scaling Interventions to Manage Chronic Disease: Innovative Methods at the Intersection of Health Policy Research and Implementation Science (McGinty et al., Prevention Science, 2022)
• Determining Predictors of Weight Loss in a Behavioral Intervention: A Case Study in the Use of Lasso Regression (Lupton-Smith et al., Front. Psychiatry, 2022)
• A Model for Advancing Scale-Up of Complex Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: the ALACRITY Center for Health and Longevity in Mental Illness (McGinty et al., J Gen Intern Med., 2021)
• Agent-Based Modeling for Implementation Research: An Application to Tobacco Smoking Cessation for Persons with Serious Mental Illness (Huang et al., Implement Res Pract, 2021)
• Generalizability of Subgroup Effects (Seamans et al., Epidemiology, 2021)
• Generalizing randomized trial findings to a target population using complex survey population data (Ackerman et al., Stat Med, 2020)
• The Promise, and Challenges, of Methods to Enhance the External Validity of Randomized Trial Results (Stuart et al., Clin. Pharmacol. Ther., 2020)