Category: Help Desk
I’m reporting within- and between-group effects in from a multilevel model, and my reviewer says I need to address “sampling error” in the group means. What does this mean, and what can I do to address this?
My advisor told me I should group-mean center my predictors in my multilevel model because it might “make my effects significant” but this doesn’t seem right to me. What exactly is involved in centering predictors within the multilevel model?
A reviewer recently asked me to comment on the issue of equivalent models in my structural equation model. What is the difference between alternative models and equivalent models within an SEM?
I have a fair amount of missing data that I don’t want to delete prior to my analysis. What are the best options available for me to retain these partially missing cases?
Missing data are a common problem faced by nearly all data analysts, particularly with the increasing emphasis on the collection of repeated assessments over time.…
The Cronbach’s Alphas for all the scales in my path analysis are in the .7s, so why is a reviewer criticizing me for not paying sufficient attention to reliability?
The issue of reliability can be a complex and often misunderstood issue. Entire text books have been written about reliability, validity, and scale construction, so…
How can I estimate statistical power for a structural equation model?
This is a question that often arises when using structural equation models in practice, sometimes once a study is completed but more often in the…
What are modification indices and should I use them when fitting SEMs to my own data?
This is a great question and is one that prompts much disagreement among quantitative methodologists. Nearly all confirmatory factor analysis or structural equation models impose…
Do you have any materials that demonstrate how to estimate structural equation models using lavaan in R?
This is a question we often hear, particularly from students and junior researchers who don’t have access to expensive commercial software for fitting structural equation…
How do you choose the best longitudinal data analytic method for testing your research questions?
We have worked with statistical models for longitudinal data for more than two decades and this remains a vexing question to us both. There are…
