Over the last decade, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of published systematic reviews of prevalence. In meta-analyses of prevalence, the summary estimate represents an average prevalence from included studies. This estimate is truly informative only if there is no substantial heterogeneity among the different contexts being pooled.…

Practitioners and policymakers often want estimates of the effect of an intervention for their local community, e.g., region, state, county. In the ideal, these multiple population average treatment effect (ATE) estimates will be considered in the design of a single randomized trial. Methods for sample selection for generalizing the sample ATE to…

A reference interval provides a basis for physicians to determine whether a measurement is typical of a healthy individual. It can be interpreted as a prediction interval for a new individual from the overall population. However, a reference interval based on a single study may not be representative of the broader population. Meta-analysis can…

A two-level data set can be structured in either long format (LF) or wide format (WF), and both have corresponding SEM approaches for estimating multilevel models. Intuitively, one might expect these approaches to perform similarly. However, the two data formats yield data matrices with different numbers of columns and rows, and their "cols :…

The purpose of this study was to compare calibration and linking methods for placing pretest item parameter estimates on the item pool scale in a 1-3 computerized multistage adaptive testing design in terms of item parameter recovery. Two models were used: embedded-section, in which pretest items were administered within a separate module, and…

Development of graphical methods for representing data has not kept up with progress in statistical techniques. This article presents a brief history of graphical representations of research findings and makes the case for a revival of methods developed in the early and mid-twentieth century, notably ISOTYPE and Chernoff's faces. It resurrects and…

Many students persistently misinterpret histograms. Literature suggests that having students solve dotplot items may prepare for interpreting histograms, as interpreting dotplots can help students realize that the statistical variable is presented on the horizontal axis. In this study, we explore a special case of this suggestion, namely, how…

Over the past ten years, propensity score methods have made an important contribution to improving generalizations from studies that do not select samples randomly from a population of inference. However, these methods require assumptions and recent work has considered the role of bounding approaches that provide a range of treatment impact…

This article studies the Type I error, false positive rates, and power of four versions of the Lagrange multiplier test to detect measurement noninvariance in item response theory (IRT) models for binary data under model misspecification. The tests considered are the Lagrange multiplier test computed with the Hessian and cross-product approach,…

The accuracy of a diagnostic test is often expressed using a pair of measures: sensitivity (proportion of test positives among all individuals with target condition) and specificity (proportion of test negatives among all individuals without target condition). If the outcome of a diagnostic test is binary, results from different studies can easily…

This paper follows an earlier report of young children's object play activities investigated in a cross-sectional sample of 289 typically developing children. Thirty-minute videotaped observations were taken of children at 8, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 54, and 60 months of age in their homes. Forty-nine percent were boys. Children were identified…

Multivariate count data is ubiquitous in many areas of research including the physical, biological, and social sciences. These data are traditionally modeled with the Dirichlet Multinomial distribution (DM). A new, more flexible Dirichlet-Tree Multinomial (DTM) model is gaining in popularity. Here, we consider Bayesian DTM regression models. Our…

Increasing evidence has shown that implicit learning shapes visuospatial attention, yet how such learning interacts with top-down, goal-driven attention remains unclear. This study investigated the relationship between task goals and selection history using a location probability learning (LPL) paradigm. We tested whether a top-down spatial cue…

Teaching and learning undergraduate statistics has been a most challenging task for undergraduate psychology majors (Salkind, 2017). A seasoned statistics instructor consulted with a seasoned instructional designer on a method to improve a particularly demanding course using a performance improvement approach to address learning difficulties she…

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…