Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2020 Mar 9;15(3):e0230276. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230276. eCollection 2020.
Sudden gains are large and stable improvements in an outcome variable between consecutive measurements, for example during a psychological intervention with multiple assessments. Researching these occurrences could help understand individual change processes in longitudinal data. Three criteria are generally used to identify sudden gains in psychological interventions. However, applying these criteria can be time consuming and prone to errors if not fully automated. Adaptations to these criteria and methodological decisions such as how multiple gains are handled vary across studies and are reported with different levels of detail. These problems limit the comparability of individual studies and make it hard to understand or replicate the exact methods used. The R package suddengains provides a set of tools to facilitate sudden gains research. This article illustrates how to use the package to identify sudden gains or sudden losses and how to extract descriptive statistics as well as exportable data files for further analysis. It also outlines how these analyses can be customised to apply adaptations of the standard criteria. The suddengains package therefore offers significant scope to improve the efficiency, reporting, and reproducibility of sudden gains research.
突跃是指在连续测量中，结果变量的大幅且稳定的改善，例如在多次评估的心理干预中。研究这些现象可以帮助我们理解纵向数据中的个体变化过程。通常使用三个标准来识别心理干预中的突跃。然而，如果没有完全自动化，应用这些标准可能会很耗时且容易出错。适应这些标准和方法学决策，例如如何处理多个突跃，在不同的研究中存在差异，并以不同的详细程度报告。这些问题限制了个体研究的可比性，使得难以理解或复制所使用的确切方法。R 包 suddengains 提供了一组工具来促进突跃研究。本文演示了如何使用该包来识别突跃或突降，以及如何提取描述性统计数据和可导出的数据文件以进行进一步分析。它还概述了如何自定义这些分析以应用标准标准的适应。因此，suddengains 包为提高突跃研究的效率、报告和可重复性提供了很大的空间。
