What’s the most striking, surprising, or interesting thing you learned today/yesterday, and why? by Batu Kaya

Editor’s Note: “What’s the most striking, surprising, or interesting thing you learned today/yesterday, and why?” That’s the question we asked the NAPS Science Communicators to address in their first post at NAPS after arriving on Sunday and experiencing the first full day on Monday. Here’s what NAPS Science Communicator Batu Kaya from the University of Toronto had to say on the matter.

“Mixed-methods research is one of the best tools we have for capturing the full biopsychosocial spectrum of someone’s pain experience. I’m continually impressed by the unique ways researchers combine frameworks and data types to get there.

One of the student talks showcased this brilliantly. Fellow NAPSter Patricia Dionicio presented her work on physical activity among Latinos with chronic low back pain. Using a multilevel, intersectional lens in her qualitative interviews, she identified culturally specific factors that could modify physical activity. She then translated those findings into an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol. Study participants filled out self-report surveys administered at multiple time points per day over two weeks.

Through her work, she developed a method that captures not just what shapes activity, but how it might be changing over time, adding a temporal layer to an already robust multilevel analysis. I thought that this was a genuinely clever way to characterize the lived experience of chronic pain.”