Darcy A. Santor

Student mental health and performance

Despite the considerable progress in the assessment of depression, there are a number of enduring questions concerning most, if not all, measures of depression. These include how relatively effective response options are within different levels of depressive severity (option effectiveness), how effective scales are at detecting differences in depressive severity (scale discriminability), and whether certain groups of individuals endorse items differently (differential item functioning). Techniques based on item response models promise to resolve many of these issues because they model how individuals endorse items and options as a function of some ability, trait or condition. Consequently, analytic techniques based on item response models, which evaluate item performance as a function of depressive severity, are not only helpful in addressing problems facing many areas of research-they are essential to resolving these issues adequately. In the quantitative papers I have written, I have tried to address both substantive issues about how specific scales perform, including the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) as well as theoretical issues, such as how to equate two different scales as a function of depression (Santor et al., 1995) or evaluate whether a priori weights for individual items are supported by the data (Santor et al., 1994). I have also used similar techniques to examine the relation between item performance and scale length (Santor, Zuroff, & Fielding, 1998), as well as the relationship between rates of symptom reduction achieved during treatment and the severity of post-treatment relapse (Santor & Segal, 1999). I have also published a more conceptual article on the measurement of depression (Santor, Gregus & Welch, 2006), for which five commentaries were invited, to which I provided a rejoinder (Santor, 2006). These techniques were recently to evaluate the performance of scales assessing depression (HRSD; Santor et al. 2008) and symptoms of schizophrenia (PNSS; Santor et al., 2007).

MyHealth Magazine

MyHealth Magazine is an interactive wellness program designed to improve mental health and foster academic success in students in secondary school, college and university. Unlike other programs, which rely on one-off seminars and workshops, MyHealth Magazine promotes long-term, incremental learning through brief, engaging updates, delivered throughout the entire year, online tools and activities, as well as interactive surveys, questionnaires and polls, designed to foster independent learning.

MyHealth Magazine content is rigorously researched, formally cited and continuously updated by experts based at the University of Ottawa. All of the materials are developed in accordance with current research findings from large-scale, peer-reviewed studies and are consistent with the guidelines and recommendations from the national health and mental health agencies, such as Health Canada, the United States National Institutes of Health and the Centre for Disease Control.

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Please visit www.myhealthmagazine.net for more information about the entire program or www.myhealthmag.net to visit and sign up for the resource.

Harassment and violence against educators

The harassment and violence against educators project is lead by Dr. Chris Bruckert and Dr. Darcy Santor. The goal of the project is to assess the nature, frequency and impact of harassment and violence against educators and education workers. Two large-scale surveys have been conducted with the support of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Education Sector) in Ontario.

Over 1,688 educators participated in the Harassment and Violence against Educators (Ontario) Survey and over 3000 classroom-based workers (e.g., Education Assistants, Designated Early Childhood Educators) and school support staff (e.g., school support workers (e.g., clerical, custodia, IT and maintenance staff). Results of the study suggest that there has been an almost seven-fold increase in the experience of violence against educators in the past 12 years when the first Canadian surveys examining violence against educators were conducted. In a 2005 study of Ontario school teachers, 7% of educators reported experiencing violence at some point in their careers; in the current study, that rate has ballooned to 54% in a single school year. You can read more about this project and download the reports and published articles here.

Significance

Despite the extraordinary amount of scholarship examining bullying, harassment, and violence against students, number in the thousands, the workplace violence experienced by educators has received limited attention in Canada and elsewhere. A recent systematic review of the research literature, from 1988 to 2016 (Reddy et al., 2018), identified only 37 articles on violence against educators, with the majority completed in the past few years, and only one conducted in Canada (Wilson, Douglas & Lyon, 2011). These are among the first studies to examine the nature, frequency and impact of harassment and violence against educators and education workers.

Measurement and psychometrics

This line of research examines the performance of scales and measures using a variety of advanced psychometric methods, including item response theory. Techniques based on item response models promise to resolve many of these issues because they model how individuals endorse items and options as a function of some ability, trait or condition. Consequently, analytic techniques based on item response models, which evaluate item performance as a function of depressive severity, are not only helpful in addressing problems facing many areas of research-they are essential to resolving these issues adequately. In the quantitative papers I have written, I have tried to address both substantive issues about how specific scales perform, including the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) as well as theoretical issues, such as how to equate two different scales as a function of depression (Santor et al., 1995) or evaluate whether a priori weights for individual items are supported by the data (Santor et al., 1994). I have also used similar techniques to examine the relation between item performance and scale length (Santor, Zuroff, & Fielding, 1998), as well as the relationship between rates of symptom reduction achieved during treatment and the severity of post-treatment relapse (Santor & Segal, 1999).

The Registry of Scales and Measures

The Registry of Scales and Measures, www.scalesandmeasures.net, arose out of my monograph on the measurement of depression, which was accompanied by six commentaries and my own rejoinder (all published in Measurement in 2006). The goal of the website was to provide researchers with access to all measures on depressive severity, which now exceeds 400. The site has had almost 2 million visits.

Please visit www.scalesandmeasures.net.

Drug Cocktails Website

This Drug Cocktails website was created with the Children's & Women's Health Centre of British Columbia for young people to help them "get the facts" and make safe choices about the medications they take and the effects of mixing their medications with other substances like cigarettes, alcohol and various street drugs.

Please visit www.drugcocktails.ca.

Applications of item response theory

Despite the considerable progress in the assessment of depression, there are a number of enduring questions concerning most, if not all, measures of depression. These include how relatively effective response options are within different levels of depressive severity (option effectiveness), how effective scales are at detecting differences in depressive severity (scale discriminability), and whether certain groups of individuals endorse items differently (differential item functioning). Techniques based on item response models promise to resolve many of these issues because they model how individuals endorse items and options as a function of some ability, trait or condition. In the quantitative papers I have written, I have tried to address both substantive issues about how specific scales perform, including the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) as well as theoretical issues, such as how to equate two different scales as a function of depression (Santor et al., 1995) or evaluate whether a priori weights for individual items are supported by the data (Santor et al., 1994). I have also used similar techniques to examine the relation between item performance and scale length (Santor, Zuroff, & Fielding, 1998), as well as the relationship between rates of symptom reduction achieved during treatment and the severity of post-treatment relapse (Santor & Segal, 1999). I have also published a more conceptual article on the measurement of depression (Santor, Gregus & Welch, 2006), for which five commentaries were invited, to which I provided a rejoinder (Santor, 2006). These techniques were recently to evaluate the performance of scales assessing depression (HRSD; Santor et al. 2008) and symptoms of schizophrenia (PNSS; Santor et al., 2007).

Significance

The studies I have published to date are among the few studies to adequately distinguish group mean differences from item bias, and they are also among the first to employ non-parametric item response models to analyzing test data. Analytic techniques originally used in these papers (Santor, Ramsay, & Zuroff, 1995; Santor, Zuroff, Ramsay, Cervantes & Palacios, 1997) have since been adopted by other researchers and have been used in developing the major revision of the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996).