As a research assistant, you will join a team working on the project “Understanding and improving engagement and retention in NHS gambling treatment services”, which is led by Professor Matt Field and funded by the Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling. The research assistant will provide specialist research support to the project, particularly extracting and coding information, merging different datasets, and securely managing data. You will work closely with other members of the project team and stakeholders including clinicians and people with lived experience of treatment.
The overarching aim of the project is to use machine learning methods to understand why many people who are referred for treatment will drop out prematurely. To do this, two studies are planned. One will use a machine-learning-driven content analysis of referral notes and use this information, alongside contextual factors, to distinguish who is likely to attend their initial assessment versus who is not. The other study will use data from initial clinical assessments alongside contextual factors and treatment characteristics to identify characteristics of people who complete treatment and people who drop out prematurely, again using machine learning methods. Important outcomes from the project include developing and validating tools that can identify service users who require additional support or different forms of support to help them remain engaged with treatment. This tool can be applied in future work and can inform additional research that will develop and evaluate interventions to improve engagement and retention in treatment.
The research assistant will play a key role in preparing and managing the datasets, including extracting, cleaning, merging, and coding data from clinical records, and supporting the development of initial analytic pipelines for supervised machine learning models.
