singmann / Structural-Equation-Modeling-foR-Psychologists

Lesson files used in the Structural Equation Modeling for Psychologists - Practical Applications in R, taught at Ben-Gurion University on the Negev

Structural Equation Modeling foR Psychologists

_{Last updated 2020-07-30.}

This Github repo contains all lesson files used in the graduate-level course: Structural Equation Modeling foR Psychologists - Practical Applications in R, taught at Ben-Gurion University on the Negev (spring 2019 semester). This course assumes basic competence in R (importing, regression modeling, plotting, etc.), a long the lines of the prerequisite course, Advanced Research Methods foR Psychologists.

The goal is to impart students with the basic tools to construct, evaluate and compare Structural Equation Models (SEM; w/ plots), using lavaan.

Notes:

• This repo contains only materials relating to Practical Applications in R, and does not contain any theoretical or introductory materials.
• Please note that some code does not work on purpose, to force students to learn to debug.

Setup

You will need:

1. A fresh installation of R (preferably version 3.6 or above).
2. RStudio IDE (optional, but recommended).
3. The following packages, listed by lesson:

Lesson	Packages
01 path analysis	lavaan, semPlot, lavaanPlot
02 latent variables and hypothesis testing	lavaan, semTools, dplyr, semPlot, psychTools, bayestestR
03 cross-lagged panel model	lavaan, semPlot, bayestestR
04 multiple group analysis	lavaan, bayestestR, semPlot, semTools
05 latent growth curve modeling	lavaan, semPlot
06 assumption checks	lavaan, semTools, car
07 moderation in lavaan	lavaan, semTools
08 EFA	parameters, psych, lavaan, semPlot, dplyr, tidyr, psychTools, nFactors

You can install all the packages used by running:

# in alphabetical order:

pkgs <- c(
  "bayestestR", "car", "dplyr", "lavaan", "lavaanPlot", "nFactors",
  "parameters", "psych", "psychTools", "semPlot", "semTools", "tidyr"
)

install.packages(pkgs, dependencies = TRUE)

The package versions used here:

##  bayestestR         car       dplyr      lavaan  lavaanPlot    nFactors 
##     "0.7.2"     "3.0-8"     "1.0.0"     "0.6-6"     "0.5.1"     "2.4.1" 
##  parameters       psych  psychTools     semPlot    semTools       tidyr 
##     "0.8.2" "1.9.12.31"    "1.9.12"     "1.1.2"     "0.5-3"     "1.1.0"

Other Useful Resources

• lavaan toutorials.
• Sacha Epskamp’s online course and YouTube lectures.
• Michael Hallquist’s course.