Although variable-oriented analyses are dominant in developmental psychopathology, researchers have championed a person-oriented approach that focuses on the individual as a totality. This view has methodological implications and various person-oriented methods have been developed to test person-oriented hypotheses. Configural frequency analysis…

Differential item functioning (DIF) assessment is a crucial component in test construction, serving as the primary way in which instrument developers ensure that measures perform in the same way for multiple groups within the population. When such is not the case, scores may not accurately reflect the trait of interest for all individuals in the…

In education, sample characteristics can be complex due to the nested structure of students, teachers, classrooms, schools, and districts. In the past, not many considerations were given to such complex sampling schemes in statistical power analysis. More recently in the past two decades, however, education scholars have developed tools to conduct…

Research increasingly emphasizes understanding differential effects. This article focuses on understanding regression mixture models, which are relatively new statistical methods for assessing differential effects by comparing results to using an interactive term in linear regression. The research questions which each model answers, their…

Previous studies have found that individuals with autism spectrum disorders show impairments in mentalizing processes and aberrant brain activity compared with typically developing participants. However, the findings are mainly from male participants and the aberrant effects in autism spectrum disorder females and sex differences are still…

One of the central assumptions of the causal-indicator literature is that all causal indicators must be included in the research model and that the exclusion of one or more relevant causal indicators would have severe negative consequences by altering the meaning of the latent variable. In this research we show that the omission of a relevant…

Educational analysts studying achievement and other educational outcomes frequently encounter an association between initial status and growth, which has important implications for the analysis of covariate effects, including group differences in growth. As explicated by Allison (1990), where only two time points of data are available, identifying…

The effects of mean ability difference (MAD) and short tests on the performance of various DIF methods have been studied extensively in previous simulation studies. Their effects, however, have not been studied under multilevel data structure. MAD was frequently observed in large-scale cross-country comparison studies where the primary sampling…

Social networks in education commonly involve some form of grouping, such as friendship cliques or teacher departments, and blockmodels are a type of statistical social network model that accommodate these grouping or blocks by assuming different within-group tie probabilities than between-group tie probabilities. We describe a class of models,…

In this article, an overview is given of four methods to perform factor score regression (FSR), namely regression FSR, Bartlett FSR, the bias avoiding method of Skrondal and Laake, and the bias correcting method of Croon. The bias correcting method is extended to include a reliable standard error. The four methods are compared with each other and…

A common question asked by researchers using regression models is, What sample size is needed for my study? While there are formulae to estimate sample sizes, their assumptions are often not met in the collected data. A more realistic approach to sample size determination requires more information such as the model of interest, strength of the…

Bayesian techniques have become increasingly present in the social sciences, fueled by advances in computer speed and the development of user-friendly software. In this paper, we forward the use of Bayesian Asymmetric Regression (BAR) to monitor intervention responsiveness when using Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) to assess oral reading…

Regression, weighting and related approaches to estimating a population mean from a sample with nonrandom missing data often rely on the assumption that conditional on covariates, observed samples can be treated as random. Standard methods using this assumption generally will fail to yield consistent estimators when covariates are measured with…

Educational researchers commonly use the rule of thumb of "design effect smaller than 2" as the justification of not accounting for the multilevel or clustered structure in their data. The rule, however, has not yet been systematically studied in previous research. In the present study, we generated data from three different models…

Since heterogeneity between reliability coefficients is usually found in reliability generalization studies, moderator analyses constitute a crucial step for that meta-analytic approach. In this study, different procedures for conducting mixed-effects meta-regression analyses were compared. Specifically, four transformation methods for the…