Mrs Rosalind Plowright

With great sadness I announce that Mrs Rosalind Plowright died on 5th October following diagnosis of cancer earlier this year. Rosalind was an undergraduate student in the psychology department at Royal Holloway from 1990 to 1993, graduating with a first-class degree. I supervised her third-year research project involving evaluation of questionnaires used with patients with diabetes in general practice. Following graduation, she stayed on at Royal Holloway to work as a researcher in the Diabetes Research Group, which later became Health Psychology Research and, in 2010, an independent research unit, the Health Psychology Research Unit (HPRU). Rosalind worked with me for 24 years. She worked with Mapi for almost as long, and very much enjoyed visiting Mapi in Lyon for international harmonisation meetings.
Rosalind was a linguist as well as a research psychologist. She had fluent German, having lived in Germany for a time and taught German for six years: she also had what she herself described as ‘reasonable French, some Spanish, and Italian’. Rosalind had a great facility with languages and interest in how they grow and change when they are exported to other countries: an interest of direct relevance to the linguistic validation of questionnaires. In the early 1990s when she first joined my research group, linguistic validation methodology was in its infancy and Rosalind made important contributions to the development of the gold standard procedures used today. In recent years she managed the linguistic validation team in HPR Ltd, overseeing the work to create new language versions of the 60 or more questionnaires developed by HPRU, some of which are in 110+ languages. When commercial funding was available for the linguistic validation work, Rosalind and her team collaborated frequently with Mapi in Lyon. When external funding was not available, clinicians and academics able to put together the necessary team of linguists, interviewer and clinicians, were supported by Rosalind and her team step by step through the linguistic validation process and quality control, to produce new gold-standard language versions of questionnaires needed. Rosalind provided such support for many clinicians, academics and students globally.
Rosalind had an Honorary Associate Researcher role in HPRU where she was involved in projects designing new questionnaires, ensuring that the English used would be readily translatable into other languages when needed.  She contributed to several publications and conference presentations. Her enthusiasm for her work was infectious and she had been training others in recent years to pass on her skills and expertise in preparation for her retirement. She had planned to retire at the end of 2016 but, sadly, Rosalind’s departure from Royal Holloway was hastened by ill-health.  We will all miss her.
 
Clare Bradley, Professor of Health Psychology, Head of HPRU and CEO of HPR Ltd, Royal Holloway, University of London
21 November 2016