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:

Lesson	Packages
01 path analysis	lavaan, tidySEM, dplyr, ggplot2
02 CFA	lavaan, tidySEM, dplyr, semTools, psychTools, patchwork
03 SEM with CLPM	lavaan, tidySEM, magrittr, bayestestR
04 multiple group analysis	lavaan, tidySEM, bayestestR, semTools
05 (mediated) moderation	lavaan, semTools
06 latent growth curve + multi-level SEM	lavaan, tidySEM
07 assumption checks	lavaan, semTools, MVN, car
08 EFA	lavaan, psych, tidyverse, recipes, parameters, factoextra, performance, nFactors, GPArotation, psychTools

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)

Package Versions

The package versions used here:

• bayestestR 0.13.1 (CRAN)
• car 3.1-2 (CRAN)
• dplyr 1.1.1 (CRAN)
• factoextra 1.0.7 (CRAN)
• ggplot2 3.4.2 (CRAN)
• GPArotation 2023.3-1 (CRAN)
• lavaan 0.6-15 (CRAN)
• magrittr 2.0.3 (CRAN)
• MVN 5.9 (CRAN)
• nFactors 2.4.1.1 (CRAN)
• parameters 0.21.0 (CRAN)
• patchwork 1.1.2 (CRAN)
• performance 0.10.3 (CRAN)
• psych 2.3.3 (CRAN)
• psychTools 2.3.3 (CRAN)
• recipes 1.0.5 (CRAN)
• semTools 0.5-6.917 (Dev)
• tidySEM 0.2.3 (CRAN)
• tidyverse 2.0.0 (CRAN)

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