Research Questions

Primary research question

Does augmenting validated psychopathology questionnaires with person-specific perceived causal relations provide information that is incremental to conventional questionnaire scores and item profiles?

Core domains

Feasibility and burden

• Can the augmentation be completed quickly enough for online assessment?
• How many nodes can be assessed without excessive burden?
• What proportion of participants can generate an interpretable network?

Reliability

• How stable is the selection of relevant items?
• How stable are individual causal ratings?
• Are global network characteristics more stable than individual edges?

Person specificity

• To what extent do participants with highly similar questionnaire profiles nevertheless report different causal structures?
• Which aspects of network structure show the greatest between-person heterogeneity?

See Analysis/Same Symptoms Different Networks.

Incremental validity

Does PCN information explain or predict relevant outcomes beyond:

• total or subscale scores,
• baseline outcome levels,
• symptom breadth,
• selected-item severity,
• and, where feasible, the complete item profile?

Representativeness

• How well do participants feel represented by their network?
• Which network properties are associated with perceived representativeness?
• Does participant refinement improve representativeness?

Clinical and subjective utility

• Does network feedback increase problem understanding or coherence?
• Does it increase perceived personalization?
• Does it increase perceived control, insight, motivation, or treatment relevance?

Generalizability

• Do the same network-derived indicators show value across different questionnaires?
• Can a common augmentation framework be applied across symptom domains and age groups?

Candidate confirmatory question

A strong confirmatory test would compare a base model containing conventional questionnaire information with an augmented model that additionally contains prespecified PCN features.

See Validation Framework.