About
Mirinda Tyo, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a board-certified trauma nurse, clinical educator, and nurse leader. She has over 20 years of clinical expertise caring for patients with chronic illness. Her program of research focuses on understanding the experiences of family members impacted by chronic illnesses and the factors that influence their health and wellbeing, such as caregiver burden, caregiver resilience, stress, and stigma. Family caregivers represent a large underserved population and her research goal is for healthcare providers and policy makers to better understand how to help family caregivers improve their resilience and quality of life, so they can continue with essential caregiving duties.
Dr. Tyo has expertise in perspective mapping, a novel mixed method, and psychometric methods. Perspective mapping blends qualitative research on participants’ lived experiences with measurable quantitative frameworks. It is an interviewing technique used to co-create a visual map of the lived experience of a phenomenon of interest (ex. experiences of Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, asthma). The technique generates quantitative information about the frequencies of symptoms, and qualitative information to help characterize the lived experience. The method has gained substantial attention in the field of neurology to address FDA requirements for patient experience data that can be used to support decision-making related to new digital technology and patient reported outcome (PRO) measures. Dr. Tyo has developed two instruments, Stigma in Substance Use Disorder Scale and the Psychometric Reliability & Investigation of Research Instruments rubric.