Welcome
This is the website of Gjalt-Jorn Peters. It is the home of the ScienceR blog, and collects links to other websites, such as:
ScienceR blog
Living (in progress) books
One of the formats I use to publish contents is living1 open access books.
The Book of Behavior Change: this book is a practical handbook for developing behavior change interventions. It does not cover the entire intervention development process, nor provide much theoretical background, instead providing practical tools. It is based on what are basically simple (trivial, even) but inevitable mechanics based on how the human psychology and behavior change work. As such, the book can be used alongside whichever approach one uses, be it Intervention Mapping, the Behavior Change Wheel, Design Thinking, or what have you.
The ROCK book: The Reproducible Open Coding Kit book, or the ROCK book, describes the Reproducible Open Coding Kit, a versatile open standard for embedding codes in qualitative data (well, as long as the data are textual, e.g. interview transcripts). The ROCK book also describes the
{rock}R package, to analyse sources coded with the ROCK standard, and the iROCK interface, to easily code qualitative sources with the ROCK.SysRevving: The SysRevving book is an open access book about doing open and systematic systematic reviews using open source tools. That is not a typo: it really says systematic systematic reviews, reflecting how this book aims to make systematic reviews as systematic as possible. This is tied in with the aim of making them as open, transparent, and machine-readable as possible.
Brief bio
I was born in Sneek in 1981, and was raised in Grou (both in Fryslân). After high-school, I moved to Enschede to study computer science in 1999. There, I found out, first, that this was not about coding as much as about mathematics, and second, that mathematics was not my strong suit. I stopped after six months and moved to Maastricht, where I started studying psychology at Maastricht University. I continued on a PhD. with Gerjo Kok, studying ecstasy use-related harm reduction strategies, and then a post-doc on threatening communication as a behavior change method.
In 2011, I moved to the Open University of the Netherlands as an assistant professor at the Methods & Statistics department, where I became associate professor in 2021. Over time, my research interests have broadened from a focus on behavior change science and nightlife-related risk behaviors to also include methodology (of quantitative approaches as well as qualitative approaches and evidence synthesis), measurement, and validity.
My curriculum vitae contains more details about the kind of stuff I do. I only update it when I need it for something. The most extensive version is dated September 2022, add tou can download it here.
Footnotes
Living books are books that can be updated ‘live’, instead of requiring discontinuous release through formal editions. Each of these books will, however, get assigned formal editions every time substantial revisions have taken place compared to the previous version. The first formal edition will mark the first version of the book that is considered finished, and from that point onwards, the DOI of each book will be updated so that each new edition will have a unique DOI.↩︎