Current projects

Health care

These are several projects arising from or inspired by my recent work in health care.

Outcomes of Monoclonal Antibody Use in Patients with COVID-19 - a propensity-matched comparison of the effect of monoclonal antibodies on 28-day rehospitalization and mortality in 21,139 outpatients who presented with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 infections to Seattle area emergency departments from 2021 to 2022

Predicting Mortality in Patients with Necrotizing Fasciitis: A Machine Learning Study - Unsupervised and supervised models to predict mortality in 158 Boston area inpatients diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacterial infections) from 2008 to 2019¹

Predicting Mortality in Heart Failure Patients Admitted to ICU - a logistic regression analysis of mortality in 1,177 adult heart failure (HF) patients admitted to a Boston hospital from 2008 to 2019

Religion

These are a couple of projects inspired by my abiding interests in the sociology of religion and analysis of data from large national surveys.

Retention, Transition, and Disaffiliation from American Christianity: Trend Data from the General Social Survey, 1972-2018 - A tool for exploring trends in the religious affiliation of American adults, based on pooled cross-sections of data from the General Social Survey, 1973 to 2018.

America’s Changing Religious Traditions - A Sankey diagram visualization of data from the Pew Research Center’s 2015 America’s Changing Religious Landscape Study

In-progress

These are works in progress inspired by my abiding interests in the sociology and psychology of religion, psychometrics, and analysis of data from large national surveys.

Validity Evidence for the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale (SHAS) - Koch and Edstrom (2022) developed a scale of spiritual harm and abuse by religious leaders. Here I plan to use the Rating Scale Model to examine the technical quality of the scale for use in research.

Validity of a Scale of Spiritual Well-Being - The Pew Research Center 2015 Changing Religious Landscape Survey included four items that could form a scale of spiritual well-being. I plan to use classical test theory and item response theory to assess the technical quality of this scale for use in research.

Coping during the COVID-19 Pandemic - An analysis of coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic based on data from Wave VI of the Baylor Religion Survey

A Closer Look at Glossolalia - an exploratory analysis of “speaking in tongues” among self-identified Christians in data from the Pew Research Center 2015 Changing Religious Landscape Study

Footnotes

1. Based on data from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC), a repository of publicly accessible de-identified clinical data for medical research. It offers data on patients admitted to critical care units at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston from 2008 to 2019.