In this article, Regine Haardörfer outlines five general steps taken by good data analysts and how they need to be theory-driven data-informed. She uses these to discuss some issues and propose approaches to promote better data analysis and reporting. The proposed steps to rigorous data analysis are to: (1) create an a priori data analysis plan;…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze various dimensions for measurement of human behavior. Human behaviour is complex. Behaviors, emotions, cognitions, and attitudes can rarely be described in terms of one or two variables. It is multimodal in nature. Furthermore, the traits, modalities and dimensions cannot be measured directly, but must be…

Reproducibility crises have arisen in psychology and other behavioral sciences, spurring efforts to ensure research findings are credible and replicable. Although reforms are occurring at professional levels in terms of new publication parameters and open science initiatives, the credibility and reproducibility of undergraduate research deserves…

A multiple testing procedure for examining implications of the missing completely at random (MCAR) mechanism in incomplete data sets is discussed. The approach uses the false discovery rate concept and is concerned with testing group differences on a set of variables. The method can be used for ascertaining violations of MCAR and disproving this…

Emerging evidence suggests that nicotine may enhance short-term memory. Some of this evidence comes from nonhuman primate research using a procedure called delayed matching-to-sample, wherein the monkey is trained to select a comparison stimulus that matches some physical property of a previously presented sample stimulus. Delays between sample…

In this article we address the issue of applying operant psychology to derive plausible and useful interpretations of complex firm behavior in natural settings. The objective is to discuss an appropriate methodology based on case study design, developed specifically in Vella and Foxall (2011), to produce an operant interpretation of secondary…

Using 3 diversified datasets, we explored the pattern-recognition ability of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) artificial neural network as applied to diversified nonlinear data distributions in the areas of behavioral and physiological research. Experiment 1 employed a dataset obtained from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Data for this study…

The detection of outliers and influential observations is routine practice in linear regression. Despite ongoing extensions and development of case diagnostics in structural equation models (SEM), their application has received limited attention and understanding in practice. The use of case diagnostics informs analysts of the uncertainty of model…

The authors propose a general modeling framework called the general monotone model (GeMM), which allows one to model psychological phenomena that manifest as nonlinear relations in behavior data without the need for making (overly) precise assumptions about functional form. Using both simulated and real data, the authors illustrate that GeMM…

In recent years, research in the area of intervention development has been shifting from the traditional fixed-intervention approach to "adaptive interventions," which allow greater individualization and adaptation of intervention options (i.e., intervention type and/or dosage) over time. Adaptive interventions are operationalized via a sequence…

Behavioral science researchers routinely use scale scores that sum or average a set of questionnaire items to address their substantive questions. A researcher applying multiple imputation to incomplete questionnaire data can either impute the incomplete items prior to computing scale scores or impute the scale scores directly from other scale…

Measures of agreement are used in a wide range of behavioral, biomedical, psychosocial, and health-care related research to assess reliability of diagnostic test, psychometric properties of instrument, fidelity of psychosocial intervention, and accuracy of proxy outcome. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) is a popular measure of…

The process-component approach has become quite popular for examining many psychological concepts. A typical example is the model with internal restrictions on item difficulty (MIRID) described by Butter (1994) and Butter, De Boeck, and Verhelst (1998). This study proposes a hierarchical generalized random-situation random-weight MIRID. The…

Within the subfields of political psychology and the study of gender, the introduction of new data collection efforts, methodologies, and theoretical approaches are transforming our understandings of these two fields and the places at which they intersect. In this article we present an overview of the research that was presented at a National…

A common problem in exploratory factor analysis is how many factors need to be extracted from a particular data set. We propose a new method for selecting the number of major common factors: the Hull method, which aims to find a model with an optimal balance between model fit and number of parameters. We examine the performance of the method in an…