The present work focuses on the performance of two types of shrinkage priors--the horseshoe prior and the recently developed regularized horseshoe prior--in the context of inducing sparsity in path analysis and growth curve models. Prior research has shown that these horseshoe priors induce sparsity by at least as much as the "gold…

Mediation analysis plays an important role in understanding causal processes in social and behavioral sciences. While path analysis with composite scores was criticized to yield biased parameter estimates when variables contain measurement errors, recent literature has pointed out that the population values of parameters of latent-variable models…

Mediation models have been widely used in many disciplines to better understand the underlying processes between independent and dependent variables. Despite their popularity and importance, the appropriate sample sizes for estimating those models are not well known. Although several approaches (such as Monte Carlo methods) exist, applied…

Recent critiques of physics education research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer" in PER, this paper discusses some of the fundamental issues in statistical causal inference. In…

Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) refers to fitting structural equation models (SEMs) (such as path models or factor models) to meta-analytic data. Currently, fitting MASEMs may be challenging for researchers that are not accustomed to working with R software and packages. Therefore, we developed webMASEM; a web application for…

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is widely used in behavioral, social, and education research. Drawing publication-ready path diagrams for SEM is not a pleasant task with the existing software. The article introduces an open-source web-based graphical application, "semdiag," for drawing WYSIWYG SEM path diagrams interactively. The…

Purpose: Overall quantitative research aims to observe certain fundamental principles of logic and scientific frame of reasoning. There continues to be challenges on how quantitative research is conducted in the field of information systems. Design/methodology/approach: Structured equation modelling (SEM) research identifies concerns about the…

Objective: Extreme sport participation and injury rates have increased in recent decades. This study aimed to investigate sub-dimensions of impulsivity and sensation seeking that contribute to participation and injury risk in extreme sports. Participants: Data included cross-sectional survey responses from 7,109 college students (Mage=19.68, SD =…

Massive Open Online Courses, universally labelled as MOOCs, become more and more relevant in the era of digitalization of higher education. The availability of free education resources without access restrictions for a plenty of potential users has changed the learning market in a way unthinkable only few decades ago. This form of web-based…

This research aims to analyze studies that have investigated the effects of teacher empowerment on job satisfaction. From the results obtained from the meta-analytic structural equation modeling of 11 studies (N = 19,462), it has been found that the teacher empowerment model and job satisfaction are meaningfully correlated. The findings have also…

Path models with observed composites based on multiple items (e.g., mean or sum score of the items) are commonly used to test interaction effects. Under this practice, researchers generally assume that the observed composites are measured without errors. In this study, we reviewed and evaluated two alternative methods within the structural…

Leadership is one of the essential factors that can influence community involvement in realizing the character of male and female students in the "pesantren" (Islamic boarding schools) in Jambi, Indonesia. This study proposed "Nyai"'s (female religious leaders in the "pesantren") charismatic, economic, and social…

Little empirical evidence is available on what drives young people to engage in higher education. Such knowledge is crucial in order to motivate students to make the most of their potential. This study surveyed a total of 294 Swedish high school students. The result shows that intentions play a mediating role between students' attitudes and the…

Hope is an important component that helps engage people in solving problems. Environmental educational resources addressing climate change effectively should ideally nurture hope as well as increase understanding about the issue. However, hopefulness about resolving climate change challenges is a relatively new construct in the literature and…

This research aimed to investigate the relationships between positive and negative perfectionisms, self-handicapping, self-efficacy and academic achievement. For this purpose, an extensive literature review was conducted and a model was suggested. Structural equation model was employed to test the model. The study group of the research consisted…