Structural Equation Modeling foR Psychologists

_{Last updated 2023-06-03.}

This Github repo contains all lesson files for SEM - Practical Applications in R. The goal is to impart students with the basic tools to construct, evaluate and compare Structural Equation Models (SEM; w/ plots), using lavaan.

These topics were taught in the graduate-level course Structural Equation Modeling (Psych Dep., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev). This course assumes basic competence in R (importing, regression modeling, plotting, etc.), along the lines of Practical Applications in R for Psychologists.

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 4.0 or above).
2. RStudio IDE (optional, but recommended).
3. The following packages, listed by lesson:

You can install all the packages used by running:

# in alphabetical order:

pkgs <-
  c(
    "bayestestR", "car", "dplyr", "factoextra", "ggplot2", "GPArotation",
    "lavaan", "magrittr", "MVN", "nFactors", "parameters", "patchwork",
    "performance", "psych", "psychTools", "recipes", "semTools",
    "tidySEM", "tidyverse"
  )

install.packages(pkgs, dependencies = TRUE)

Other Useful Resources

Other Courses

In addition to lavaan’s toutorials, you might find the following online courses useful:

• Sacha Epskamp’s online course and YouTube lectures.
  • See also the psychonetrics package for psychometric network modeling.
• Michael Hallquist’s course.

Selected Quantitude (podcast) Episods

These are selected episodes from the Quantitude podcast related to SEM:

• S2E08: Mediation and the Art of Squid Spleening
• S2E24: The Equivalent Models Problem
• S2E26: MLM vs. SEM: Opportunities for Growth