The relationship between motivation and EFL proficiency is an issue of great concern in previous research on foreign language learning. However, work in this area offers inconclusive evidence with regard to the directionality of their relations. Using cross-lagged structural equation modeling, this study investigated the directionality of the…

A critical aspect of intervention research is investigating the active ingredients that underlie intensive interventions and their theories of change. This study explored the rate of instructional interactions within treatment groups to determine whether they offered explanatory power of an empirically validated Tier 2 kindergarten mathematics…

It has been debated on the basis of change-detection procedures whether visual working memory is limited by the number of objects, task-relevant attributes within those objects, or bindings between attributes. This debate, however, has been hampered by several limitations, including the use of conditions that vary between studies and the absence…

In this commentary, David Thissen states that "Goodness-of-fit assessment for IRT models is maturing; it has come a long way from zero." Thissen then references prior works on "goodness of fit" in the index of Lord and Novick's (1968) classic text; Yen (1984); Drasgow, Levine, Tsien, Williams, and Mead (1995); Chen and…

Objective: Using a framework informed by problem behavior theory, the authors examined differential relationships between religiosity and the frequency of cigarette and waterpipe tobacco smoking. Participants: Six hundred fourteen individuals beginning their freshman year at a large, public, midwestern university. Methods: Paper-and-pencil surveys…

This article presents three studies, two of them longitudinal, which investigated the relations between age, processing speed, working memory (WM), and fluid intelligence ("g[subscript f]") from 4 to 16 years of age. Structural equation modeling showed that speed was a powerful covariate of age ([approximately] - 0.6 to - 0.7) from 4 to 13 years,…

Veterinarians have an increased risk for suicide compared with the general population, yet there is little consensus regarding why this might be. We hypothesized that veterinarians become relatively fearless about death due to their repeated exposure to euthanasia. Accordingly, we predicted that there would be a positive relationship between…

Academic entitlement has been theoretically linked with uncivil student behavior; however, this relationship has not been tested. To address this gap in the literature, the authors used latent means modeling to estimate the relationship between the Academic Entitlement Questionnaire and uncivil student behavior. The authors gathered scores on the…

This substantive-methodological synergy applies evolving approaches to factor analysis to substantively important developmental issues of how five-factor-approach (FFA) personality measures vary with gender, age, and their interaction. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) conducted at the item level often do not support a priori FFA structures, due…

Response patterns are of importance to survey researchers because of the insight they provide into the thought processes respondents use to answer survey questions. In this article we propose the use of structural equation modeling to examine response patterns and develop a permutation test to quantify the likelihood of observing a specific…

Parceling is referred to as a procedure for computing sums or average scores across multiple items. Parcels instead of individual items are then used as indicators of latent factors in the structural equation modeling analysis (Bandalos 2002, 2008; Little et al., 2002; Yang, Nay, & Hoyle, 2010). Item parceling may be applied to alleviate some…

In 2005, Agnew introduced a new integrated theory, which he labels a general theory of crime and delinquency. He proposes that delinquency is more likely to occur when constraints against delinquency are low and motivations for delinquency are high. In addition, he argues that constraints and motivations are influenced by variables in five life…

Avoidance is proposed to be a goal-directed behavior rather than a behavior that reflects passivity or inaction. To evaluate this proposition, a typology of conflict goals and a typology of conflict avoidance strategies are created, and the relationship between nonavoidance strategies and the elements of these 2 typologies are evaluated within a…

This article develops a procedure based on copulas to simulate multivariate nonnormal data that satisfy a prespecified variance-covariance matrix. The covariance matrix used can comply with a specific moment structure form (e.g., a factor analysis or a general structural equation model). Thus, the method is particularly useful for Monte Carlo…

This study examined the role of the latent and financial benefits of work as defined by Marie Jahoda (1982) in explaining a person's work involvement. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks on work commitment and work motivation, the latent benefits were expected to have a positive, whereas the financial benefits were expected to have a negative…