Dan McNeish
@dmcneish.bsky.social
1.6K followers 220 following 55 posts
Quant Psyc professor at Arizona State. Into clustered data, latent variables, psychometrics, intensive longitudinal data, and growth modeling. https://sites.google.com/site/danielmmcneish
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Reposted by Dan McNeish
quantitude.bsky.social
For those interested, here is a link to a new power paper:

Hancock, G. R., & Feng, Y. (2026). nmax and the quest to
restore caution, integrity, and practicality to the sample size planning process. Psychological Methods.

yifengquant.github.io/Publications...
Reposted by Dan McNeish
johnsakaluk.bsky.social
🧵
Very excited (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social) to share our preprint tutorial for using our R 📦 dySEM for #dyadic data analysis with latent variables, in cross-sectional data sets.

This paper has been literal years in the making, and provides three distinct tutorials.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
dmcneish.bsky.social
These kind of models make lots of assumptions, so make sure not to skip the limitations section if you're considering something like this!

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dmcneish.bsky.social
Trying the model out on the motivating empirical data and made a huge difference, changing the sign and conclusion about the intervention effect (2nd and 3rd row in the image, left vs. right column).

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dmcneish.bsky.social
The paper basically takes the Diggle-Kenward model from growth model in tries to jam it into a multilevel autoregressive model/DSEM.

Some simulations showed that it worked well, was much better than models that assume MAR when data are MNAR, and that it recovers true values pretty well

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dmcneish.bsky.social
New paper on dealing with MNAR intensive longitudinal data. Ran into this problem in an empirical study and didn't find too much in the methods literature on MNAR ILD, so this was the best I could come up with. Lots of opportunity to improve methods in this area!

psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...
dmcneish.bsky.social
Recent papers from personality cited in the “Directly using items as predictors” section of the paper below basically argue that it doesn’t matter what items measure as long as they predict a relevant outcome (which sounds like predictive > other validity)

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Practical Implications of Sum Scores Being Psychometrics’ Greatest Accomplishment - Psychometrika
This paper reflects on some practical implications of the excellent treatment of sum scoring and classical test theory (CTT) by Sijtsma et al. (Psychometrika 89(1):84–117, 2024). I have no major disag...
link.springer.com
dmcneish.bsky.social
This work was part of a project funded by the US Dept of Education/IES, which has been a major supporter of pure methods/statistics/psychometrics work in US so that people like me don't have to beg substantive people to tack a methods aim onto an empirical grant

/end
dmcneish.bsky.social
Goal is hopefully to help researchers be a little more articulate about reporting reliability of scale scores and incorporate more recent ideas from the psychometric literature on conditional reliability when it may be appropriate and complement summary indices like alpha or omega

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dmcneish.bsky.social
The output also provides a number between 0 and 100.

Values close to 100 indicate that alpha/omega represent most scores well.

Values close to 0 indicate that scores have heterogeneous reliability and a summary does not describe some of the sample very well.

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dmcneish.bsky.social
Result is a plot that looks like this -- the conditional reliability at each score (the colored line; color indicates how many people are at that scores) is plotted against the alpha/omega summary index (black line)

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dmcneish.bsky.social
Shiny input looks like this -- upload the data, identify the scale items, the desired coefficient, and choose a method from which to calculate the "reliability representativeness" (different methods discussed in the paper)

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dmcneish.bsky.social
Basic idea borrows conditional reliability from IRT literature and compares the discrepancy of the conditional reliability function to a single summary like alpha/omega.

Shiny app to implement the method is located at dynamicfit.app/RelRep/

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Reliability Representativeness
dynamicfit.app
dmcneish.bsky.social
New paper - coefficients like alpha/omega are commonly reported to summarize reliability. A sneaky nuance is that reliability is actually different at each score in the data. Paper tries to quantify how representative alpha/omega are of a typical score.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com
dmcneish.bsky.social
This paper on intensive longitudinal reliability led by Sebastian Castro-Alvarez is one of the best I've read in a while -- the review was so thorough, the code was fantastic, and it answered any questions I had about IL reliability. Definitely check it out you work with ILD!

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
dmcneish.bsky.social
Next week, I'm teaching a 3-day workshop on DSEM for intensive longitudinal data using Mplus and registration is still open -- more information about the topics and registration can be found here!

statisticalhorizons.com/seminars/dyn...
Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling Seminar | Statistics Course
This online course by Dan McNeish Ph.D., introduces both foundational and intermediate topics in DSEM.
statisticalhorizons.com
dmcneish.bsky.social
Yes, I think you'd have use Bayesian methods in Mplus. I also don't think you could do a continuous time version in Mplus because I don't think that they've added support for binary variables in continuous time (although I might be behind on what is supported!)
dmcneish.bsky.social
The OSF link is here if you’re interested, osf.io/be8h3/

It’s intensive longitudinal data where where the outcome is a binary self-report question on binge eating. There’s 50% missingness and a suspected MNAR process where people don’t respond to the binge eating question when they binge eat
Missing Not at Random Intensive Longitudinal Data with Dynamic Structural Equation Models
Hosted on the Open Science Framework
osf.io
dmcneish.bsky.social
I made this switch a few years ago and the another thing that came up was that R (at least lme4 ) gives a lot more convergence warnings and errors than SAS, even when the output is identical. McCoach (2018, JEBS) studied this systematically and found similar results.
Reposted by Dan McNeish
kevinmking.bsky.social
I don't understand how you can read and understand an evolving literature without keeping up with methodological developments.

What are we supposed to do, just read discussion sections and take people's word for it?