Background: Aggression is one of the more stable characteristics of child and adolescent development, and violent behavior in early adulthood is often foreshadowed by aggressive behavior in childhood and early adolescence. Considerable evidence has linked coercive family interactions to aggressive behavior in childhood, but less research has been…

This article presents our response to Oud and Folmer's "Modeling Oscillation, Approximately or Exactly?" (2011), which criticizes aspects of our article, "Latent Differential Equation Modeling of Self-Regulatory and Coregulatory Affective Processes" (2011). In this response, we present a conceptual explanation of the derivative-based estimation…

Background: Oral language skills in the preschool and early school years are critical to educational success and provide the foundations for the later development of reading comprehension. Methods: In a randomized controlled trial, 180 children from 15 UK nursery schools ("n" = 12 from each setting; M[subscript age] = 4;0) were randomly…

A scale was developed to measure perceptions of sexual abuse in youth sports by assessing (a) the perceived prevalence of sexual abuse committed by pedophilic youth sport coaches, (b) the perceived likelihood that a coach is a pedophile, (c) perceptions on how youth sport organizations should manage the risk of pedophilia, and (d) media influence…

Despite the widespread popularity of growth curve analysis, few studies have investigated robust growth curve models. In this article, the "t" distribution is applied to model heavy-tailed data and contaminated normal data with outliers for growth curve analysis. The derived robust growth curve models are estimated through Bayesian…

This article uses a general latent variable framework to study a series of models for nonignorable missingness due to dropout. Nonignorable missing data modeling acknowledges that missingness may depend not only on covariates and observed outcomes at previous time points as with the standard missing at random assumption, but also on latent…

There are two mainstream curricula for international school students at the junior high level: the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE). The former was developed in the mid-1990s and is currently being relaunched in a 21st-century approach.…

This paper presents a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach for blended synchronous teacher training workshop. It examines the relationship among various factors that influence the Satisfaction (SAT) of participating teachers. Data were collected with the help of a questionnaire from about 500 engineering college teachers. These teachers…

Institutions of higher education are under pressure to be accountable for their expenditures while demonstrating their effectiveness. Through structural equation modeling, a relationship was found between expenditures and the efficiency and effectiveness of an institution, and an optimal expenditure level was found that maximized an institution's…

Background: Teachers play a critical role in protecting students from harm in schools, but little is known about their attitudes toward addressing problems like bullying. Previous studies have rarely used theoretical frameworks, making it difficult to advance this area of research. Using the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), we examined the…

In the present study the longitudinal relations between quantity of centre-based child care (in months) and teacher reports of internalising and externalising behaviour in the first and second grades were examined for 325 Slovenian children. The socio-political context of affordable, accessible and homogenously high-quality child care is quite…

In Iran, high school graduates enter university after taking a very difficult entrance exam called the Konkoor. Therefore, only the top-performing students are admitted by universities to continue their bachelor's education in statistics. Surprisingly, statistically, most of such students fall into the following categories: (1) do not succeed in…

In the structural equation modeling literature, the normal-distribution-based maximum likelihood (ML) method is most widely used, partly because the resulting estimator is claimed to be asymptotically unbiased and most efficient. However, this may not hold when data deviate from normal distribution. Outlying cases or nonnormally distributed data,…

Incomplete nonnormal data are common occurrences in applied research. Although these 2 problems are often dealt with separately by methodologists, they often cooccur. Very little has been written about statistics appropriate for evaluating models with such data. This article extends several existing statistics for complete nonnormal data to…

In the last decades there has been an increasing interest in nonlinear latent variable models. Since the seminal paper of Kenny and Judd, several methods have been proposed for dealing with these kinds of models. This article introduces an alternative approach. The methodology involves fitting some third-order moments in addition to the means and…