What does combining 40 different measurement styles mean for Australia?

Researcher: Associate Professor Matthew Sunderland

Program Lead in Measurement and Methodology at the Matilda Centre  

If you’ve ever been to a doctor for your mental health, there’s a good chance you’ve been asked to do a survey, e.g., the K10. These surveys are a series of questions designed to help doctors estimate your levels of psychological distress and help find a treatment path for you.  

However, there are 40+ different tools to measure psychological distress. How can we have consistent data about how these conditions are affecting us at the population level?  

Different surveys may measure different symptoms and lead to different answers. This is why you see different statistics for how common mental health and substance use conditions are in Australia.  

To help bring clarity to what Australia’s picture of mental health and substance use looks like, Associate Professor Matthew Sunderland is taking on the mammoth task of combining all these measurements together and creating a path forward.  

In this Researcher Spotlight, we join him to learn more about epidemiology and what he hopes to see as an outcome to the work. 

I started working with Professor Tim Slade in my first “real” job after completing my Bachelor (Honours) in 2007. At the time, Tim was working at the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and Depression with Professor Gavin Andrews. We worked together on projects that focused on the 2007 National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Gavin persuaded me to begin a PhD, and I was lucky enough to obtain a scholarship to complete my thesis full time, while still managing to survive.  

After finishing my PhD, I worked in a post-doctoral role before deciding that I needed to expand my research world. I applied for a role at the Drug Policy Modelling Program at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre and while I greatly enjoyed my time at DPMP, I realised I wasn’t quite finished in the world of psychometrics and epidemiology.  

I was then incredibly lucky to be awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellowship and Project grant that allowed me to expand my PhD work. This included developing a range of new measurements for mental health and examining the validity of epidemiological findings in older Australian adults. I joined up with Tim as my supervisor, who was working with Professor Maree Teesson on establishing a recently awarded NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence (the early beginnings of the Matilda Centre).  

I continued to work alongside Tim and Maree, supported by my fellowship and a variety of other projects, until the Matilda Centre opened in late 2018. I have been here ever since.

At the broadest level, epidemiology is the study of diseases and disorders within the population. For epidemiological research in mental health and substance use, this includes understanding how many people are impacted by these disorders.  

We ask additional questions to determine risk and protective factors, long term outcomes, trends over time and across cohorts, and the impact of treatment and population-level interventions.  

I think of epidemiology as establishing a strong foundation in our knowledge of mental and substance use disorders, so then we can build important evidence-based preventions, treatments, and policies to reduce the impact of these disorders in the population.  

Seeing the wealth of data that has been collected in this country being repurposed and expanded to address important and nuanced questions, which can’t be addressed by analysing single datasets alone.  

I also enjoy developing a potential way that researchers and clinicians could compare and combine information, despite using different measures or approaches. This can increase the flexibility of collecting information, make the information comparable, and provide greater meaning to scores determined across different sets of measures.  

On a more personal level, I love playing with data, figuring out new methods to combine and analyse data, and bringing order to often chaotic datasets, so this project is somewhat of a dream come true!  

I really hope that harmonising different datasets might bring about new ways of re-purposing and utilising existing datasets and making new discoveries that might not have been previously possible.  

Dr Deanna Varley and I have been working on creating online portals and resource platforms that make it easier to identify datasets and the different variables within each dataset. Lots of advances have been made by using big data and data linkage in other medical fields, but in the field of mental health and substance use a lot of these studies are hampered by using different measures across different datasets.  

By utilising new psychometric and statistical methods to connect different measures and essentially create a common language to compare and contrast data from multiple studies, I hope to see new discoveries in terms of emerging risk and protective factors, better prediction models, and improved forecasting of changing trends in mental health and substance use over time. 

Learn more about Associate Professor Matthew Sunderland's project: Standing on the shoulders of giants: harmonising 40 years of data to revolutionise Australia’s response to increases in psychological distress.