Gregory R. Hancock

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Program Director at University of Maryland, College Park

Tests in the null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) framework are designed to identify differences between groups. Thus, researchers wishing to assess similarities are out of luck if they use widespread techniques in the field such as t-tests, chi-square tests, and linear regression. This is unfortunate given that researchers with many common...

Objective Estimate the independent contributions of in-utero HIV exposure and post-natal environment on neurodevelopment at 24 months of age. Methods We recruited mother-infant pairs from 2018–2022 during the second trimester of pregnancy in Malawi. Children who were HIV exposed and uninfected (CHEU) and children unexposed to HIV and uninfected (C...

Larsson, T., Biber, D., Hancock, G. R. (2024). On the role of cumulative knowledge building and specific hypotheses: The case of grammatical complexity. Corpora, 19(3). Abstract As corpus linguistics matures as a field, there are an increasing number of research areas in which we have accrued sufficient knowledge that we can start building knowledg...

Extreme heat events are more frequent and intense as a result of global climate change, thus posing tremendous threats to public health. However, extant literature exploring the multidimensional features of heat–health risks from a spatial perspective is limited. This study revisits extreme heat–health risk and decomposes this concept by integratin...

Persistent inequities in the educational success of Black adolescents are a critical social justice concern. Though psychological distress has been associated with worse educational outcomes, less is known about the mechanisms that may influence this association. This study used nationally representative cross-sectional data from the National Surve...

The present study tests the empirical adequacy of competing models of grammatical complexity in university student writing, based on analysis of disciplinary texts from L1-English and L2-English students. The results show that grammatical complexity in student writing must be treated as a multi-dimensional linguistic construct, distinguishing among...

Growth models which estimate the developmental trajectory of phenomenon of interest (i.e., unconditional models), and then potentially use covariates to predict individual variability in growth (i.e., conditional models), are common in both applied and methodological work. However, models which in turn use individual variability in growth to predic...

Educational Impact and Implications Statement Previous studies have shown that preschool children develop partial understanding of multidigit number meanings outside of school, likely through learning mechanisms that support comparisons and making connections. In this study, we asked whether having this informal foundation enables kindergarteners t...

Children’s early accuracy on place value (PV) tasks longitudinally predicts their later multidigit calculation skills. However, another window into children’s emerging base-ten concepts is the pattern of errors—‘smart errors’—they exhibit on these measures. Past research has speculated that these smart errors—similar to invented spelling—might refl...

In many studies, grammatical complexity has been treated as a single unified construct. However, other research contradicts that view, suggesting instead that the different structural types and syntactic functions of complexity features are distributed in texts in fundamentally different ways. These patterns have been documented in general corpora...

The widespread and persistent underrepresentation of groups experiencing health disparities in research involving biospecimens is a barrier to scientific knowledge and advances in health equity. To ensure that all groups have the opportunity to participate in research and feel welcome and safe doing so, we must understand how research studies may b...

Fit indices are descriptive measures that can help evaluate how well a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model fits a researcher’s data. In multigroup models, before between-group comparisons are made, fit indices may be used to evaluate measurement invariance by assessing the degree to which multiple groups’ data are consistent with increasingly...

Background and objectives: In this study, we investigated the efficacy of a self-administered, online Social Intelligence Training (SIT) program aimed at enhancing psychological and relational well-being among a nationwide U.S. sample of custodial grandmothers. Research design and methods: A two-arm randomized clinical trial (RCT) was conducted,...

Although there is a long tradition of research analyzing the grammatical complexity of texts (in both linguistics and applied linguistics), there is surprisingly little consensus on the nature of complexity. Many studies have disregarded syntactic (and structural) distinctions in their analyses of grammatical text complexity, treating it instead as...

A currently overlooked application of the latent curve model (LCM) is its use in assessing the consequences of development patterns of change -- that is as a predictor of distal outcomes. However, there are additional complications for appropriately specifying and interpreting the distal outcome LCM. Here, we develop a general framework for underst...

Learner corpus research has a strong tradition of collecting metadata. However, while we tend to collect rich descriptive information about learners on directly measurable variables such as age, year of study, and time spent abroad, we frequently do not know much about learner characteristics that cannot be measured directly (and that thus need to...

Objective: This secondary analysis of longitudinal data on Latino immigrant parents applied latent change modeling to investigate the association between within‐family change in parent–child conflict and within‐individual change in parent's psychological distress, and how within‐individual change in parenting stress mediates that association over t...

In many research and applied settings across the social, behavioral, and health sciences, it is variability, rather than averages, that is of key interest. Examples include consistency/stability of an individual over multiple measurements (intraindividual variability), and cohesiveness among members within a group or team (intragroup variability)....

Place value concepts were measured longitudinally from kindergarten (2017) to first grade (2018) in a diverse sample (n = 279; Mage = 5.76 years, SD = 0.55; 135 females; 41% Black, 38% White, 8% Asian, 12% Latino). Children completed three syntactic tasks that required an explicit understanding of base-10 symbols and three approximate tasks that co...

As an important facet of construct validity, incremental validity has been the focus of many applied investigations across a wide array of disciplines. Unfortunately, traditional methodological approaches for studying incremental validity, typically rooted in multiple regression, have many limitations that can hinder such assessments. In the curren...

Episodic memory is a cornerstone ability that allows one to recall past events and the spatiotemporal context in which they occur. In an effort to characterise the development of this critical ability, many different tasks have been used independently to assess age-related variations in episodic memory. However, performance on memory tasks is multi...

Episodic memory is a cornerstone ability that allows one to recall past events and the spatiotemporal context in which they occur. In an effort to characterize the development of this critical ability, many different tasks have been used independently to assess age-related variations in episodic memory. However, performance on memory tasks is multi...

Historically it has been reported that deaf students do not achieve age-appropriate outcomes in reading, with this performance often being characterized in terms of a fourth grade ceiling. However, given the shifts in the field during the past 20 years (e.g., widespread implementation of newborn hearing screening, advances in hearing technologies),...

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic due to the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). While scientists have moved quickly to study the physical health implications of the disease, less attention has been paid to the negative mental health repercussions. The current study utilized a communi...

The simple view of reading describes reading as the product of decoding (D) and listening comprehension (LC). However, the simple view of reading has been challenged, and evidence has proved it to be too simple to explain the complexities of reading comprehension in the elementary school years. Hypotheses have been advanced that there are cognitive...

One of the most vexing challenges facing developmental researchers today is the statistical modeling of two or more behaviors as they unfold jointly over time. Although quantitative methodologists have studied these issues for more than half a century, no widely agreed‐upon principled strategy exists to empirically analyze codevelopmental processes...

The hippocampus has been suggested to show protracted postnatal developmental growth across childhood. Most previous studies during this developmental period have been cross-sectional in nature and have focused on age-related differences in either hippocampal subregions or subfields, but not both, potentially missing localized changes. This study c...

Having one’s funding cut in the course of conducting a longitudinal study has become an increasingly real challenge faced by developmental researchers. The main purpose of the current work is to propose “post hoc” planned missing (PHPM) data designs as a promising solution in such difficult situations. This study discusses general guidelines that c...

It is increasingly recommended that hypothesis-generating studies be conducted after initial RCTs in order to identify moderators of differential treatment efficacy on individual outcomes. Such analyses are important because they help clarify the best inclusion and exclusion criteria or choice of stratification for maximizing power in subsequent RC...

The present article aims to introduce structural equation modeling, in particular measured variable path models, and discuss their great potential for corpus linguists. Compared to other techniques commonly employed in the field such as multiple regression, path models are highly flexible and enable testing a priori hypotheses about causal relation...

Paper accepted for publication in Mental Health and Aging

Grounded in the multidisciplinary field of strategic risk and health communication, this study proposed and tested a new infectious disease threat (IDT) appraisal model, focused on mapping individuals’ coping strategy preferences as predicted by their perceived predictability and controllability of the disease. A 2 (predictability: high vs. low) ×...

Background The Baby Preparation and Worry Scale (Baby-PAWS) addresses expectant mothers' anticipatory worries regarding the transition to parenthood, focusing on practical concerns (i.e., ability to care for the infant, securing childcare, personal wellbeing, and partner involvement). Aims The present study describes measurement development, psych...

Aims: This study sought to explore the decision to participate in genomics research for African American individuals. Our overall goal was to explore (1) the attributes that significantly contribute to willingness to participate in genomics research; (2) how these attributes are interpreted (what is their meaning?); (3) how trustworthiness is esti...

As an alternative to Cronbach’s α for estimating scale reliability, McDonald’s ω has attracted increased attention within the methodological community for its less stringent measurement assumptions. Notwithstanding, ω is still seldom used by practitioners, likely due to its unavailability in popular software packages (e.g., SPSS) and the need for c...

Background and objectives: Influenza poses a public health threat for children and adults. The CDC recommends annual influenza vaccination for children <18 years, yet vaccine uptake remains low for children (57.9%) and adults (37.1%). Given that parental decision-making is key in childhood vaccine uptake, there is a critical need to understand vac...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of change leadership (informing, communicating, involving and supporting) and change management (reasons and competencies for change) for organisational change processes and their outcomes across public and private organisations. The study includes three specific change situations:...

Using the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy, we examined pre–post changes in empathy directed toward people from different racial/ethnic cultural groups than one’s own for 189 undergraduate students from 20 sections of helping skills classes. We hypothesized that racial minority students and women would score higher than their respective counterparts...

As an alternative to Cronbach’s alpha for estimating scale reliability, McDonald’s omega has attracted increased attention within the methodological community for its less stringent measurement assumptions. Notwithstanding, omega is still seldom used by practitioners, likely due to its unavailability in popular software packages (e.g., SPSS) and th...

Background: The severity and treatment of depression/anxiety during pregnancy and postpartum has important implications for maternal and child well-being. Yet, little is known about prenatal SSRI use and early child socioemotional development. This study explores effects of prenatal SSRI exposure, and pre- and postnatal internalizing symptoms on t...

Asymmetric patterns of frontal brain electrical activity reflect approach and avoidance tendencies, with stability of relative right activation associated with withdrawal emotions/motivation and left hemisphere activation linked with approach and positive affect. However, considerable shifts in approach/avoidance‐related lateralization have been re...

In longitudinal/developmental studies, individual growth trajectories are sometimes bounded by a floor at the beginning of the observation period and/or a ceiling toward the end of the observation period (or vice versa), resulting in inherently nonlinear growth patterns. If the trajectories between the floor and ceiling are approximately linear, su...

Latent growth models, a special class of longitudinal models within the broader structural equation modeling (SEM) domain, provide researchers a framework for investigating questions about change over time; yet rarely is time itself modeled as a focal parameter of interest. In the current article, rather than treating time purely as an index of mea...

Health communication has contributed to an increase in family planning use through education and mass media as a means to increase health literacy. In this research, we investigate health literacy as an auxiliary component of health communication. We test the validity of the Health Literacy Skills Framework by examining the correlation of health li...

Temperament growth has been examined in infancy, but the spectrum of reactive and regulatory dimensions was not previously considered. We evaluated linear and nonlinear growth trajectories for overarching factors and fine-grained indicators of infant temperament obtained via parent report (N = 143) at 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months of age. Contribution...

Introduction: Vaccine hesitancy (VH) has emerged as a factor in vaccine delay and refusal yet the measurement of the constructs within vaccine hesitancy remains a challenge. Outstanding questions include; should VH be measured as an attitude or a behavior? What is the role of key constructs including confidence, complacency, and convenience? What...

The Reviewer’s Guide to Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences is a resource for those reviewing manuscripts and grant proposals, and also for the researchers doing the research that leads to those manuscripts and proposals. The book is laid out with a very deliberate design, written by people who are both content matter experts and outstandin...

Despite the rising cultural phenomenon of grandparents parenting grandchildren on a full-time basis due to problems within the birth parent generation, intervention studies with these families have been scarce, methodologically flawed, and without conceptual underpinnings. We conducted a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with 343 custodial grandmothe...

In this ITEMS module, we frame the topic of scale reliability within a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) context and address some of the limitations of Cronbach's α. This modeling approach has two major advantages: (1) it allows researchers to make explicit the relation between their items and the latent variables...

Lance, Beck, Fan, and Carter (2016) recently advanced six new fit indices and associated cut-off values for assessing data-model fit in the structural portion of traditional latent variable path models. The authors appropriately argued that, while most researchers’ theoretical interest rests with the latent structure, they still rely on indices of...

The hippocampus is a structure that is critical for memory. Previous studies have shown that age-related differences in specialization along the longitudinal axis of this structure (i.e., subregions) and within its internal circuitry (i.e., subfields) relate to age-related improvements in memory in school-age children and adults. However, the influ...

There is scant research on how the parenting practices of custodial grandmothers affect the psychological adjustment of grandchildren in their care. Yet, the findings from a handful of prior studies suggest the relevance of the Family Stress Model (FSM) to these caregivers. The present study further tested the FSM with baseline data from 343 custod...

Adult influenza vaccination rates remain suboptimal, particularly among African Americans. Social norms may influence vaccination behavior, but little research has focused on influenza vaccine and almost no research has focused on racially-specific norms. This mixed methods investigation utilizes qualitative interviews and focus groups (n = 118) an...

External misspecification, the omission of key variables from a structural model, can fundamentally alter the inferences one makes without such variables present. This article presents two strategies for dealing with omitted variables, the first a fixed parameter approach incorporating the omitted variable into the model as a phantom variable where...

We examine some key errors that influence the validity of scientific inquiry in the social and behavioral sciences, emphasizing the need for researchers to be attuned to the varied sources of error. We discuss error beyond simple inferential processes inherent in null hypotheses testing, for example. and broaden the scope of influences in the model...

Background: Adults with chronic conditions are at much greater risk of influenza-related morbidity and mortality, yet flu vaccine uptake remains suboptimal. Research focused on the high-risk population has been limited, particularly related to racial disparities in vaccination. We explore a broad range of demographic, racial, and psychosocial fact...

Black adults are significantly less likely to be immunized for seasonal influenza when compared to Whites. This persistent disparity contributes to increased influenza-related morbidity and mortality in the African American population. Most scholarship on vaccine disparities has compared Whites and Blacks. Employing Public Health Critical Race Prax...

Trust is thought to be a major factor in vaccine decisions, but few studies have empirically tested the role of trust in adult immunization. Utilizing a 2015 national survey of African American and White adults (n = 1630), we explore multiple dimensions of trust related to influenza immunization, including generalized trust, trust in the flu vaccin...

Fear and positive emotionality were considered in a growth modeling context. Mothers, primarily Caucasian (91.9%) and of middle socioeconomic status, participated in play interactions with infants at 4 months (N = 148). Infant fear and positive affectivity were evaluated at 6, 8, 10, and 12 months of age. A linear trajectory was superior in explain...

Extreme and non-extreme response styles (RSs) are prevalent in survey research using Likert-type scales. Their effects on measurement invariance (MI) in the context of confirmatory factor analysis are systematically investigated here via a Monte Carlo simulation study. Using the parameter estimates obtained from analyzing a 2007 Trends in Internati...

Seasonal flu vaccination rates are low for U.S. adults, with significant disparities between African and white Americans. Risk perception is a significant predictor of vaccine behavior but the research on this construct has been flawed. This study addressed critical research questions to understand the differences between African and white American...

Introduction: Racial disparities in adult flu vaccination rates persist with African Americans falling below Whites in vaccine acceptance. Although the literature has examined traditional variables including barriers, access, attitudes, among others, there has been virtually no examination of the extent to which racial factors including racial con...

Latent variable modeling is a popular and flexible statistical framework. Concomitant with fitting latent variable models is assessment of how well the theoretical model fits the observed data. Although firm cut-offs for these fit indices are often cited, recent statistical proofs and simulations have shown that these fit indices are highly suscept...

Although missing data are often viewed as a challenge for applied researchers, in fact missing data can be highly beneficial. Specifically, when the amount of missing data on specific variables is carefully controlled, a balance can be struck between statistical power and research costs. This article presents the issue of planned missing data by di...

This article introduces the special issue titled “Advances in Quantitative Research Methods to Further Research in Education and Educational Psychology.” It starts by framing the context for the contributions to the special issue by highlighting some important signposts that marked the development of analytic methods facilitating inferences on chan...

This paper investigates the relation between organizational change and enacted or experienced workplace bullying. We find that there is a longitudinal relation between organizational change and bullying behaviour and that this effect varies depending on the type of preceding organizational change (task-related or relational change). Task-related ch...

We present types of constructs, individual- and cluster-level, and their confirmatory factor analytic validation models when data are from individuals nested within clusters. When a construct is theoretically individual level, spurious construct-irrelevant dependency in the data may appear to signal cluster-level dependency; in such cases, however,...

Structured means analysis is a very useful approach for testing hypotheses about population means on latent constructs. In such models, a z test is most commonly used for testing the statistical significance of the relevant parameter estimates or of the differences between parameter estimates, where a z value is computed based on the asymptotic sta...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how knowledge hoarding, functions as antecedent and consequent of work related negative acts, as a measure of bullying. The authors investigate the relation as mediated by trust and justice. Design/methodology/approach Data stem from a longitudinal study in which questionnaire respons...

This report investigates the prediction of labor force status using observed variables, such as gender, age, and immigrant status, and more importantly, measured skill variables, including literacy proficiency and a categorical rating of educational attainment based on the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), the 2003 Adult Literacy and...

For the two-way factorial design in analysis of variance, the current article explicates and compares three methods for controlling the Type I error rate for all possible simple interaction contrasts following a statistically significant interaction, including a proposed modification to the Bonferroni procedure that increases the power of statistic...

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how to implement (a) an a priori plan for sample size for a desired level of power (i.e., sample size determination) and (b) a post hoc plan to estimate power for a fixed sample size after the data have been collected (i.e., power estimation) for applications of structural equation modeling (SEM) in spo...

Despite increased interest in parenting among custodial grandmothers (CGM), there is scant research on assessing their parenting practices. With CGMs as informants we examined the factor structure for five self-report scales developed as measures of parental nurturance and discipline with birth parents, and then tested for measurement invariance by...

Although differences in goodness of fit indices (∆GOFs) have been advocated for assessing measurement invariance, studies that advanced recommended differential cutoffs for adjudicating invariance actually utilized a very limited range of values representing the quality of indicator variables (i.e., magnitude of loadings). Because quality of measur...

Although classical statistical techniques have been a valuable tool in second language (L2) research, L2 research questions have started to grow beyond those techniques’ capabilities, and indeed are often limited by them. Questions about how complex constructs relate to each other or to constituent subskills, about longitudinal development in those...

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is a quantitative data analysis method that belongs to the family of structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques. CFA allows for the assessment of fit between observed data and an a priori conceptualized, theoretically grounded model that specifies the hypothesized causal relations between latent factors and the...

A fundamental goal of longitudinal modeling is to obtain estimates of model parameters that reflect meaningful aspects of change over time. Often, a linear or nonlinear model may be sensible from a theoretical perspective, yet may have parameters that are difficult to interpret in a way that sheds light on substantive hypotheses. Fortunately, such...

Latent interaction models have motivated a great deal of methodological research, mainly in the area of estimating such models. Product-indicator methods have been shown to be competitive with other methods of estimation in terms of parameter bias and standard error accuracy, and their continued popularity in empirical studies is due, in part, to t...

Growth mixture modeling has gained much attention in applied and methodological social science research recently, but the selection of the number of latent classes for such models remains a challenging issue, especially when the assumption of proper model specification is violated. The current simulation study compared the performance of a linear g...

This study used a latent difference score growth model to investigate how changes in family structure (biological father and stepfather residence) and maternal employment are associated with American children's externalizing problem behaviours (EPB) from ages 4–10 and whether these associations vary by children's level of self-regulation. For all 4...

Over the last decade and a half, latent growth modeling has become an extremely popular and versatile technique for evaluating longitudinal change and its determinants. Most common among the models applied are those for a single measured variable over time. This model has been extended in a variety of ways, most relevant for the current work being...

Latent growth curve models with piecewise functions are flexible and useful analytic models for investigating individual behaviors that exhibit distinct phases of development in observed variables. As an extension of this framework, this study considers a piecewise linear-linear latent growth mixture model (LGMM) for describing segmented change of...

The purpose of the present study was to examine the results of implementing remedial instruction in the alphabetic principle with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students educated in a sign bilingual setting. Data were analyzed in 2 phases, with the first using paired-sample t tests and Pearson correlations and the second phase employing structural...

Incl. bibl.

This study used saturated path models to examine whether mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms, the conflict they experience as a couple, and the home environmental chaos forecast the quality of parenting. We also examined how child gender moderated parenting. Using data from the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project (EHSRE)...