Psychometric Network Modeling

Full day short course (9:00am – 5:00pm)

Short course #2

Intended Audience

Participants who have some experience with psychometric models and/or with Bayesian statistics are likely to get the most out of the class. We will not assume too much existing knowledge of the models or methods, but we will also not have time to start from scratch. There will be R code and blavaan code that participants are free to run on their laptops during the workshop, but this software is not absolutely required to benefit from the course.

Summary

Recent years have seen a rise in the network approach to psychology: modeling human behavior as a complex system of interacting psychological, biological, and sociological components. This approach has since been utilized in various topics of psychological research, such as mental health, attitude formation and intelligence. While the approach originated from a complex systems point of view, it has since inspired new psychometric modeling frameworks that are made available in open-
source and accessible software packages – now known as the field of Network Psychometrics. Network psychometrics is both an alternative to and complementary with traditional psychometric modeling techniques such as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). This workshop will introduce the attendees to the core ideas in network psychometrics and teach them how to perform psychometric network modelling in both Jasp and R.

The workshop is split in two parts. The morning session will provide a general introduction to estimating network models from cross-sectional data. We will discuss recent applications of this framework and teach the attendees how to perform these analyses using the accessible R package bootnet, as well as the graphical JASP interface. The afternoon session will discuss how network models can be used in a psychometric modelling framework which can be extended to longitudinal data designs, multi-group designs, and latent variable modeling. This session will introduce the attendees to the R package psychonetrics for SEM and psychometric network modelling.

About the Instructors

Sacha Epskamp (National University of Singapore)

 Sacha Epskamp is an an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, Department of Psychology. Previously, he worked at the University of Amsterdam in the Department of Psychology and the Centre for Urban Mental Health. In addition, Dr. Epskamp is a former research fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Studies and has been a visiting researcher at the Complexity Institute of Nanyang Technological University. In 2016, Dr. Epskamp completed his seminal PhD on network psychometrics—estimating network models from psychological datasets and equating these to established psychometric modeling techniques. This dissertation laid the groundworks for the field of Network Psychometrics. He has implemented these methods in several software packages now routinely used in diverse fields of psychological research. Dr. Epskamp teaches multivariate statistics and data science, and his research interests involve (network) psychometrics, meta-science, reproducibility, complexity, time-series modeling, and dynamical systems modeling. Dr. Epskamp has received several awards for his research, including the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, the dissertation prize of the Psychometric Society, and the junior scientific award of the Complex Systems Society. 

Adela Isvoranu (National University of Singapore)

 Dr. Isvoranu is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on pathways from mental health to mental illness and fuzzy boundaries between psychopathological conditions. Dr. Isvoranu’s PhD work, which she completed cum laude at the University of Amsterdam, argues for complexity-based conceptualizations of psychopathology, focusing on symptoms and their interactions, rather than on syndromes. Dr. Isvoranu works in a multidisciplinary environment, often collaborating with clinical psychologists, practitioners, and methodologists, ultimately aiming to facilitate the development of novel intervention approaches to improve mental health. She is the main author of the textbook “Network Psychometrics with R: A Guide for Behavioral and Social Scientists”.