Craig Enders

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychology

Recently, Asparouhov and Muthén Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 28, 1–14, (2021a, 2021b) proposed a variant of the Wald test that uses Markov chain Monte Carlo machinery to generate a chi-square test statistic for frequentist inference. Because the test’s composition does not rely on analytic expressions for sampling vari...

Objetivo: Aunque los estudios emergentes examinan la relación inversa entre la satisfacción corporal y los trastornos alimentarios en las Mujeres Negras, no se ha establecido cómo los aspectos racialmente destacados de la satisfacción corporal pueden tener implicaciones para las conductas alimentarias y los resultados de salud longitudinales. Métod...

Screening novel medications for alcohol use disorder (AUD) requires models that are both efficient and ecologically-valid. Ideally, such models would be associated with the outcomes of a given medication in clinical trials. To test a novel human laboratory model in which individuals with intrinsic motivation to change their drinking engage in a “pr...

Estimating power for multilevel models is complex because there are many moving parts, several sources of variation to consider, and unique sample sizes at Level 1 and Level 2. Monte Carlo computer simulation is a flexible tool that has received considerable attention in the literature. However, much of the work to date has focused on very simple m...

In Bayesian statistics, the most widely used criteria of Bayesian model assessment and comparison are Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) and Watanabe–Akaike Information Criterion (WAIC). We use a multilevel mediation model as an illustrative example to compare different types of DIC and WAIC. More specifically, we aim to compare the performance o...

The use of multilevel models in behavioral and social sciences has risen dramatically in the past twenty-five years. Researchers using these models often consult highly-referenced simulation studies when designing their own studies, especially for sample-size planning. However, current literature suggests two issues with this practice. First, recen...

Adversity exposures in the prenatal and postnatal period are associated with an increased risk for psychopathology, which can be perpetuated across generations. Nonhuman animal research highlights the gut microbiome as a putative biological mechanism underlying such generational risks. In a sample of 450 mother-child dyads living in Singapore, we e...

This study aimed to characterize within-person pre-COVID-19 and coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) transdiagnostic anxiety and depression symptom trajectories in emerging adults and determine the roles of neuroticism and behavioral activation in predicting these COVID-19-related changes. We recruited a sample of 342 emerging adults (aged 18–19 at base...

Composite scores are an exceptionally important psychometric tool for behavioral science research applications. A prototypical example occurs with self-report data, where researchers routinely use questionnaires with multiple items that tap into different features of a target construct. Item-level missing data are endemic to composite score applica...

The year 2022 is the 20th anniversary of Joseph Schafer and John Graham's paper titled "Missing data: Our view of the state of the art," currently the most highly cited paper in the history of Psychological Methods. Much has changed since 2002, as missing data methodologies have continually evolved and improved; the range of applications that are p...

The purpose of the current study was to test the longitudinal association between disordered-eating symptoms (body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, and bulimia) in adolescence (ages 12, 14, 16, 18, 19) and adulthood (age 40) in a sample of 883 white and Black women. We also investigated moderation by race. Adolescent symptoms at each time point...

A growing body of literature has focused on missing data methods that factorize the joint distribution into a part representing the analysis model of interest and a part representing the distributions of the incomplete predictors. Relatively little is known about the utility of this method for multilevel models with interactive effects. This study...

Background The U.S. Food and Drug Administration identifies abstinence and the absence of heavy drinking days as outcomes for pharmacotherapy trials for alcohol use disorder (AUD). However, many individuals with AUD struggle to achieve these outcomes, which may discourage them from seeking treatment. World Health Organization (WHO) risk drinking le...

Although it has been demonstrated that (a) body dissatisfaction and internalization of societal appearance standards contribute to disordered eating and (b) that internalization of societal appearance standards leads to decreased skin color satisfaction among Black women, it has not been established whether skin color dissatisfaction contributes to...

Early-life adversity is a major risk factor for psychopathology, but not all who experience adversity develop psychopathology. The current study evaluated whether the links between child and adolescent adversity and depression and anxiety were described by general benefits and / or buffering effects of interpersonal support. Data from 456 adolescen...

Depression and anxiety are highly prevalent psychological disorders; our understanding of these conditions remains limited. Efforts to explain anxiety and depression have been constrained in part by binary classification systems. Dimensional approaches to understanding psychopathology may be more effective. The present study used latent profile ana...

Objective: Pharmacological treatments that can concomitantly address cigarette smoking and heavy drinking stand to improve health care delivery for these highly prevalent co-occurring conditions. This superiority trial compared the combination of varenicline and naltrexone against varenicline alone for smoking cessation and drinking reduction amon...

Objective: Uveal melanoma, a rare eye cancer, presents potential vision loss and life threat. This prospective, longitudinal study interrogated the predictive utility of visual impairment, as moderated by optimism/pessimism, on depressive symptoms in 299 adults undergoing diagnostic evaluation. Method: Depressive symptoms (Center for Epidemiolog...

Missing data are a common occurrence in analyses of multivariate data, including in multilevel modeling. Bayesian approaches to handling missing data in multilevel modeling have garnered increasing attention, either on their own or in service of multiple imputation. However, these applications are largely confined to specific models or missingness...

Missing data are exceedingly common across a variety of disciplines, such as educational, social, and behavioral science areas. Missing not at random (MNAR) mechanism where missingness is related to unobserved data is widespread in real data and has detrimental consequence. However, the existing MNAR-based methods have potential problems such as le...

Background: Stressful life experiences and personality can influence one another. Personality may contribute to the amount and type of stress individuals experience, which is referred to as a selection effect. Life stress may also impact one's personality, which is referred to as a socialization effect. It was hypothesized that neuroticism would pr...

Questionnaire data present challenges, as a missing item of a multi-item scale would lead to a total missing scale. A researcher applying multiple imputation to an incomplete multi-item questionnaire can impute the incomplete items prior to computing scale scores or impute the scale score entirely. Methodologist have favored item-level imputation b...

Structural equation modeling (SEM) applications routinely employ a trilogy of significance tests that includes the likelihood ratio test, Wald test, and score test or modification index. Researchers use these tests to assess global model fit, evaluate whether individual estimates differ from zero, and identify potential sources of local misfit, res...

Despite the broad appeal of missing data handling approaches that assume a missing at random (MAR) mechanism (e.g., multiple imputation and maximum likelihood estimation), some very common analysis models in the behavioral science literature are known to cause bias-inducing problems for these approaches. Regression models with incomplete interactiv...

Literature addressing missing data handling for random coefficient models is particularly scant, and the few studies to date have focused on the fully conditional specification framework and “reverse random coefficient” imputation. Although it has not received much attention in the literature, a joint modeling strategy that uses random within-clust...

Youth who feel they do not fit with gender norms frequently experience peer victimization and socioemotional distress. To gauge differences between schools, the current study examined the longitudinal effects of school-level gender norm salience—a within-school association between gender typicality and peer victimization—on socioemotional distress...

This study examines whether social-emotional difficulties associated with higher body weight vary across schools as a function of the school's weight climate. Weight climate, characterized by weight-policing, was assessed indirectly by examining how strongly self-reported weight predicts victim reputation within 26 ethnically diverse middle schools...

Missing data are a common problem for psychometricians and researchers employing psychometric methods. This chapter begins with a broad introduction to missing data handling issues, with a strong emphasis on maximum likelihood estimation and multiple imputation. Maximum likelihood estimation and multiple imputation are ideally suited for a range of...

In the present study, the predictors and outcomes associated with the trajectories of peer rejection were examined in a longitudinal sample of Italian children (338 boys, 269 girls) ages 10 to 14 years. Follow-up assessments included 60% of the original sample at age 16–17. Low, medium, and high rejection trajectory groups were identified using gro...

For almost 50 years, psychologists have been theorizing about and measuring religiosity essentially the way Gordon Allport did, when he distinguished between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. However, there is a historical debate regarding what this scale actually measures, which items should be included, and how many factors or subscales exist....

Multiple imputation methods can generally be divided into two broad frameworks: joint model (JM) imputation and fully conditional specification (FCS) imputation. JM draws missing values simultaneously for all incomplete variables using a multivariate distribution, whereas FCS imputes variables one at a time from a series of univariate conditional d...

Specialized imputation routines for multilevel data are widely available in software packages, but these methods are generally not equipped to handle a wide range of complexities that are typical of behavioral science data. In particular, existing imputation schemes differ in their ability to handle random slopes, categorical variables, differentia...

Background As tobacco control policies have been implemented across the U.S. over the past decade, patterns of smoking cigarettes have significantly changed, particularly among young adults. For many users, the typical daily use pattern of smoking several packs of cigarettes per day has been supplanted by a variety of use patterns, often referred t...

In Ordinary Least Square regression, researchers often are interested in knowing whether a set of parameters is different from zero. With complete data, this could be achieved using the gain in prediction test, hierarchical multiple regression, or an omnibus F test. However, in substantive research scenarios, missing data often exist. In the contex...

Hierarchical data are becoming increasingly complex, often involving more than two levels. Centering decisions in multilevel models are closely tied to substantive hypotheses and require researchers to be clear and cautious about their choices. This study investigated the implications of group mean centering (i.e., centering within context; CWC) an...

Multiple imputation has enjoyed widespread use in social science applications, yet the application of imputation-based inference to structural equation modeling has received virtually no attention in the literature. Thus, this study has 2 overarching goals: evaluate the application of Meng and Rubin’s (1992) pooling procedure for likelihood ratio s...

The last 20 years has seen an uptick in research on missing data problems, and most software applications now implement one or more sophisticated missing data handling routines (e.g., multiple imputation or maximum likelihood estimation). Despite their superior statistical properties (e.g., less stringent assumptions, greater accuracy and power), t...

Although missing data methods have advanced in recent years, methodologists have devoted less attention to multilevel data structures where observations at level-1 are nested within higher-order organizational units at level-2 (e.g., individuals within neighborhoods; repeated measures nested within individuals; students nested within classrooms). J...

This article compares a variety of imputation strategies for ordinal missing data on Likert scale variables (number of categories = 2, 3, 5, or 7) in recovering reliability coefficients, mean scale scores, and regression coefficients of predicting one scale score from another. The examined strategies include imputing using normal data models with n...

Often when participants have missing scores on one or more of the items comprising a scale, researchers compute prorated scale scores by averaging the available items. Methodologists have cautioned that proration may make strict assumptions about the mean and covariance structures of the items comprising the scale (Schafer & Graham, 200236. Schafer...

Differential sensitivity to alcohol effects (e.g., increased stimulation and decreased sedation) is associated with heavier use and problems. Although genetic factors contribute to alcohol response (AR), environmental factors may also play a role. This study examined effects of physical context on AR using a between subjects placebo-controlled desi...

The aim of this study is to investigate a novel method for dealing with incomplete scale scores in longitudinal data that result from missing item responses. This method includes item information as auxiliary variables, which is advantageous because it incorporates the observed item-level data while maintaining the scale scores as the focus of the...

Previous studies show that missing values in multi-item questionnaires can best be handled at item score level. The aim of this study was to demonstrate two novel methods for dealing with incomplete item scores in outcome variables in longitudinal studies. The performance of these methods was previously examined in a simulation study. The two metho...

Objective: Although the adverse effects of chronic pain on work productivity and daily life pursuits are clear, the within-person dynamics of pain, goal cognition, and engagement in work-related and lifestyle goals remain uncharted. This study investigated the impact of pain intensity (assessed on 3 occasions each day) and goal-related schematic t...

AimsTo compare three missing data strategies: 1) Latent growth model that assumes the data are missing at random (MAR) model, 2) Diggle-Kenward missing not at random (MNAR) model where dropout is a function of previous/concurrent urinalysis (UA) submissions, and 3) Wu-Carroll MNAR model where dropout is a function of the growth factors.DesignSecond...

Objectives.This study investigates the interplay among religiosity, spirituality, value-expressive volunteer motivation, and volunteering. We examined religiosity and spirituality as predictors of value-expressive volunteer motivation and volunteering and whether religiosity moderated the relations between (a) spirituality and value-expressive volu...

The existing missing data literature does not provide a clear prescription for estimating interaction effects with missing data, particularly when the interaction involves a pair of continuous variables. In this article, we describe maximum likelihood and multiple imputation procedures for this common analysis problem. We outline 3 latent variable...

This indispensable sourcebook covers conceptual and practical issues in research design in the field of social and personality psychology. Key experts address specific methods and areas of research, contributing to a comprehensive overview of contemporary practice. This updated and expanded second edition offers current commentary on social and per...

Key Points · Poor diet and physical inactivity have been estimated to account for nearly 400,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and are contributing factors to obesity. Nearly one-third of children and two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese. Therefore, in early 2007 Health Foundation of South Florida (HFSF) embarked on a five-year responsive grant...

The effects of a mathematical problem-solving intervention on students’ problem-solving performance and math achievement were measured in a randomized control trial with 1,059 7th-grade students. The intervention, Solve It!, is a research-based cognitive strategy instructional intervention that was shown to improve the problem-solving performance o...

Methodologists have developed mediation analysis techniques for a broad range of substantive applications, yet methods for estimating mediating mechanisms with missing data have been understudied. This study outlined a general Bayesian missing data handling approach that can accommodate mediation analyses with any number of manifest variables. Comp...

Prenatal expectations describe various domains a woman envisions in preparation for her role as a new mother and influence how women transition into the maternal role. Although the maternal role is strongly influenced by the prevailing familial and sociocultural context, research characterizing prenatal expectations in ethnic minority and low-incom...

Research today entails the use of complex and effective tools for research. Hoping to provide for this need, The Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology hopes to deliver some valid and generalizable answers to contemporary challenging research quandaries. It is a source for learning and reviewing current best-practices in quantitative...

Approaches to handling missing data have improved dramatically in recent years and researchers can now choose from a variety of sophisticated analysis options. The methodological literature favors maximum likelihood and multiple imputation because these approaches offer substantial improvements over older approaches, including a strong theoretical...

Research has emphasized the importance of the relationship between family functioning and adolescent behavioral development. The present study examines family environment and social-emotional functioning of primarily minority adolescents, viewed from both adoles-cents' and mothers' perspectives. Participants were a school-based sample of adolescent...

Behavioral science researchers routinely use scale scores that sum or average a set of questionnaire items to address their substantive questions. A researcher applying multiple imputation to incomplete questionnaire data can either impute the incomplete items prior to computing scale scores or impute the scale scores directly from other scale scor...

Internet-based educational and therapeutic programs (e-health applications) are becoming increasingly popular for a variety of psychological and physical disorders. We tested the efficacy of an online Chronic Pain Management Program, a comprehensive, fully self-directed and self-paced system that integrates social networking features and self-manag...

The purpose of the study was to improve mathematical problem solving for middle school students with learning disabilities by implementing a research-based instructional program in inclusive general education math classes. A total of 40 middle schools in a large urban district were matched on state assessment performance level (low, medium, and hig...

Missing data methodology has improved dramatically in recent years, and popular computer programs now offer a variety of sophisticated options. Despite the widespread availability of theoretically justified methods, researchers in many disciplines still rely on subpar strategies that either eliminate incomplete cases or impute the missing scores wi...

Using a known groups design, a new Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) subscale, the 20-item Psychosocial Distress Scale (PDS), was empirically derived and cross-validated. The PDS demonstrated good classification accuracy between subjects under external incentive vs. no incentive conditions. In the initial calibration sample (N =...

The past decade has seen a noticeable shift in missing data handling techniques that assume a missing at random (MAR) mechanism, where the propensity for missing data on an outcome is related to other analysis variables. Although MAR is often reasonable, there are situations where this assumption is unlikely to hold, leading to biased parameter est...

The purpose of this longitudinal study was twofold: (a) to investigate academic, behavioral, and emotional outcomes for adolescents who were followed longitudinally from middle through high school and (b) to determine if early assessment of achievement and behavior predicts academic and behavioral outcomes for adolescents who were identified as at...

Although structural equation modeling software packages use maximum likelihood estimation by default, there are situations where one might prefer to use multiple imputation to handle missing data rather than maximum likelihood estimation (e.g., when incorporating auxiliary variables). The selection of variables is one of the nuances associated with...

A great deal of recent methodological research has focused on two modern missing data analysis methods: maximum likelihood and multiple imputation. These approaches are advantageous to traditional techniques (e.g. deletion and mean imputation techniques) because they require less stringent assumptions and mitigate the pitfalls of traditional techni...

The purpose of this article is to discuss curriculum-based measurement (CBM) as it is currently utilized in research and practice and to propose a new approach for developing measures to monitor the academic progress of students longitudinally. To accomplish this, we first describe CBM and provide several exemplars of CBM in reading and mathematics...

Cluster sampling results in response variable variation both among respondents (i.e., within-cluster or Level 1) and among clusters (i.e., between-cluster or Level 2). Properly modeling within- and between-cluster variation could be of substantive interest in numerous settings, but applied researchers typically test only within-cluster (i.e., indiv...

Maximum likelihood algorithms for use with missing data are becoming common-place in microcomputer packages. Specifically, 3 maximum likelihood algorithms are currently available in existing software packages: the multiple-group approach, full information maximum likelihood estimation, and the EM algorithm. Although they belong to the same family o...

The Bollen-Stine bootstrap can be used to correct for standard error and fit statistic bias that occurs in structural equation modeling (SEM) applications due to nonnormal data. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the use of a custom SAS macro program that can be used to implement the Bollen-Stine bootstrap with existing SEM software. Alt...

Religious people tend to live slightly longer lives (M. E. McCullough, W. T. Hoyt, D. B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, & C. E. Thoresen, 2000). On the basis of the principle of social investment (J. Lodi-Smith & B. W. Roberts, 2007), the authors sought to clarify this phenomenon with a study of religion and longevity that (a) incorporated measures of psych...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the trajectories of behavioral problems for a sample of predominately minority adolescents (n = 212, 91% African-American and/or Hispanic, 45% boys, 55% girls) in a large, urban school district and to determine the impact of parental and peer relationships, gender, and risk status on their development du...

Clinical research suggests that type of ovarian hormone loss at menopause influences cognition. Until recently ovariectomy (OVX) has been the primary rodent model to examine effects of ovarian hormone loss on cognition. This model limits evaluations to abrupt and complete ovarian hormone loss, modeling less than 13% of women who receive surgical me...

Conjugated equine estrogen (CEE) is the most commonly prescribed estrogen therapy, and is the estrogen used in the Women's Health Initiative study. While in-vitro studies suggest that CEE is neuroprotective, no study has evaluated CEE's effects on a cognitive battery and brain immunohistochemistry in an animal model. The current experiment tested w...

Identifying treatments that produce specific benefits in nondrug psychosocial functioning areas such as employment functioning has been illusive. Examination of dimensions of clinical status that moderate such effects may be useful in planning more effective interventions. The purpose of this study is to determine if life stress and four dimensions...

Adverse childhood events can influence the development of emotional and physiological self-regulatory abilities, with significant consequences for vulnerability to psychological and physical illness. This study evaluated stress sensitization and inoculation models of the impact of early parental death on stress exposure and reactivity in late adole...

To develop and validate a new measurement tool designed to assess self-reported distress responses after traumatic physical injury. A mixed-methods study design was used. Development of the Injury Distress Index (IDI) included input from patients and experts and a comprehensive literature review. The IDI and validity measures were administered by a...

A known groups design investigated the comparative predictive validity of the 27-item MMPI-2 Restructured Scale 1 (RC1), the 43-item Lees-Haley Fake Bad Scale (FBS), and the 15-item Henry-Heilbronner Index (HHI) to identify noncredible symptom response sets in 63 personal injury litigants and disability claimants compared to 77 non-litigating head-...

This study examined the impact of the 3-year implementation of a professional development intervention on science achievement of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students. Teachers were provided with instructional units and workshops that were designed to improve teaching practices and foster positive beliefs about science and liter...

Recent missing data studies have argued in favor of an “inclusive analytic strategy” that incorporates auxiliary variables into the estimation routine, and Graham (2003)6. Graham , J. W. 2003 . Adding missing-data relevant variables to FIML-based structural equation models . Structural Equation Modeling , 10 : 80 – 100 . [Taylor & Francis Online],...

A known groups design compared the ability of the 24-item MMPI-2 Restructured Clinical Demoralization Scale (RCd), the 57-item Depression Scale (Scale 2), and the 15-item Malingered Mood Disorder Scale (MMDS) to identify non-credible symptom response sets in 84 personal injury litigants and disability claimants compared to 77 non-litigating head-in...

We aimed to perform a prospective long-term follow-up of health-related quality of life (QOL) in ALS and to investigate the relationship of personality factors with changes in QOL and disease progression. Data on QOL were collected prospectively for 12 months from 31 ALS patients. Personality factors were studied using the NEO-FFI (NEO Five Factor...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the trajectories of depressive symptomology and self-concept in adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 and to determine whether primary school teacher ratings of adaptive and maladaptive behavior predict self-reported depressive symptoms and self-concept in adolescence. This study is part of an ongoing...