Applications of latent-variable models in educational psychology: The need for methodological-substantive synergies☆
Section snippets
Methodological-substantive synergies
As quantitative educational psychologists, we live in exciting times. We are armed with a bevy of new and evolving quantitative tools to address a range of substantive and policy related questions, with statistical power and flexibility that was previously unimaginable. However, this power comes at a cost to the educational psychology research discipline. In order to remain current as researchers—or even informed consumers of this research—we must become conversant with an ever-increasing range
Brief history of the growth of the application of latent variable models
Historically, SEM procedures can be traced to Sewell Wright’s work in biology, Otis Duncan’s work in sociology, and early psychometric research by Joreskog, McDonald, and others, providing confirmatory approaches to factor analysis and a means to formally test the goodness of fit of a priori measurement and structural models based on latent variables inferred from multiple indictors (Hancock & Mueller, 2006; also see Wolfle, 1999, Wolfle, 2003). In particular, SEM approaches have combined tests
Construct validity approach to evaluating latent variable models: a multiple perspective approach
Particularly when educational psychology researchers are working on the cutting edge of both methodological and substantive areas of research, it is important to critically evaluate interpretations of the results from a construct validity approach. Here we briefly outline how we have applied this approach in the design and interpretation of results from our own research.
All constructs in educational psychology are hypothetical constructs—unobservable, theoretical abstractions—inferred
Selected issues in the application of latent variable models
In this section we briefly review some of the critical issues that face methodological researchers in the application of latent variable models emphasized in our own research programs. Because of length restrictions we cannot do justice to any of these topics, and there are many other issues that could—perhaps should—have been included.
Articles in the special issue of contemporary educational psychology
Because of space limitations we can only highlight selected features of the studies included in this special issue. Our comments are necessarily idiosyncratic to our own methodological and substantive interests, and are not intended to represent a comprehensive review of the articles. By way of introduction we note that the collection of articles—as identified in the original call for papers—represents an important contribution to methodological-substantive synergies in educational
Summary
Educational psychology research is experiencing an exciting period, stimulated in part by an explosion of new and evolving latent variable approaches. However, there have not been sufficient demonstrations of the usefulness of these new techniques in substantively meaningful studies. Particularly in an applied area of research like educational psychology, it is important to demonstrate the applicability of new statistical tools in a range of applications that demonstrate their superiority over
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2021, Contemporary Educational PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Therefore, this work can add to existing knowledge about heterogeneity in students’ motivation trajectories in current literature, thereby providing a more nuanced view of students’ developmental motivation processes. Our investigation may be one of the representative demonstrations of substantive-methodological synergy—pursuing both cutting-edge methodological tools and substantively important issues (Marsh & Hau, 2007)—as parallel-process GMM allows us to provide new, important knowledge about heterogeneous developmental patterns of multiple motivational resources from a sample of students. To provide a more integrated understanding of motivational development, we used parallel-process GMM and identified multiple latent subgroups of growth patterns describing extrinsic motivation covaried with competence beliefs from grades 8 to 11, using a nationally representative sample of secondary school students in South Korea.
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We note that authors of articles in this special issue were, in some cases, asked to revise their manuscripts in relation to our comments on their original draft papers. Because of this iterative process some of our comments in relation to these particular articles might be more relevant to earlier versions of the articles than the final published version. Even when this is the case, however, it is still instructive to present the original concern as a general issue that might be relevant to other researchers pursuing methodological-substantive synergies.