May 2020

19th May update

Another week and the various files on my site continue to be downloaded which is, at this point, starting to surprise me. 3,627 total downloads, 2,265 PDF downloads and really rather bizarre 599 LimeSurvey forms and 271 Qualtrics ones. I can't really make sense of this as it seems way too many and too erratic against time to be crawlers but it doesn't make much sense in terms of likely use. Ah well. Main development this week has been two messages about fillable PDFs not work on iPhones. I don't have an iPhone but it sounds pretty clear that on some iPhones the software tries to edit the form rather than to fill it in. I think it must be only a minority of iPhones as there as so many out there and as I think that by now assuming at least some of the downloads are converting to use with clients there would have been many messages about this had everyone with an iPhone hit this. As I don't have one I'm keen to hear from people who do have one and can perhaps give any advice to others about ways to ensure that the forms can be filled in and returned successfully using one. https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/contact-us/ to contact me if you are seeing these problems and, even better, if you have solutions. Meanwhile tangentially related cv-19 work using CORE measures is rolling on well in Ecuador and Greece and about to start in Brazil and perhaps in the UK.

12th May 2020 update

Another long gap. Although I have learned a lot more about LimeSurvey and continue to be hugely impressed by the range of things it can do (for free) I decided that it simply wouldn't be feasible for me to support individual practitioners to use it. I am still not sure about services with a single technologically competent person handling it but at the moment I don't have the time to convince myself that is feasible either. A slightly more positive not: following a lead from Marco Branco of Family Psychology Mutual who created CORE-10 and YP-CORE forms in Microsoft forms I tried to see if I could add the CORE-OM and get all three measures available in both English and Spanish. UDLA (La Universidad de Las Américas) in Quito, Ecuador kindly enabled me to use Microsoft forms and my ever reliable colleague there, Dr. Clara Paz, and Victor Montenegro, did most of the work to create these forms and I finally created an instruction page (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/microsoft-forms-for-core-measures/) with links to the forms. Sadly, these are only usable for people with the appropriate licence for Microsoft Office. Meanwhile the various files continue to be downloaded, this morning we were up 1,875 fillable PDFs downloaded and a total of 3,049 files of any sort (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/parse_logs3.html) Sadly, I can't think that the LimeSurvey and Qualtrics downloads (518 and 255 respectively translate into use of those options but I'm also a bit puzzled that so many are downloaded: is that really all web crawlers? Tangentially, Dr. Paz is using the CORE-10 to monitor volunteer well-being in UDLA (Ecuador) and we have learned a lot from that, the GP-CORE has been used in rapid survey of general population reactions to cv-19 and lockdown in Greece which got over 1,800 responses in its one week. It looks as if the GP-CORE may also be used in the UK in an ambitious survey with a similar aim to the Greek one and the go ahead has been given for a survey of university staff in part of Brazil. It feels good to see CORE measures helping out and for free!