Measurement & Multilevel Modeling Lab: Lab News

2024

Meltem delivered an invited presentation titled “A Battle of Wits: Comparing the Capabilities of Generative AI and Humans in Scale Development” as a finalist in the IMPS 2024 Graduate Research Competition in Prague, showcasing the collaborative research proposed with Winnie and Jimmy.
Meltem presented two posters at IMPS 2024, titled “Comparing traditional measurement invariance and alignment approaches to data harmonization” and “Does deleting biased items make selection fairer and more accurate?”

Meltem, Winnie, and Jimmy’s submission for the IMPS 2024 Graduate Research Competition on the use of generative AI to advance psychometric research was selected as one of the top three proposals.

Winnie and Mark are co-authors of the paper “Prenatal testosterone synchrony in first-time parents predicts fathers’ postpartum relationship quality” in press in Hormones and Behavior. The first author, Sofi Cardenas, who is a graduate researcher at USC, applies Bayesian multilevel modeling in this work.

Mark is a co-author of the paper “Parent Aggression Exposure and Negative Expectancies in Couple Conversation: Rejection Sensitivity as a Mediator” in press in the Journal of Family Violence. The first author, Lexy Beale, who is a graduate researcher at USC, applies multilevel analysis in this work.

Mark co-authored the article titled “Comparing MIMIC and MIMIC-interaction to Alignment Methods for Investigating Measurement Invariance concerning a Continuous Violator” in the journal Structural Equation Modeling. The first author, Yuanfang Liu, a former Ph.D. student of Mark’s, is currently a post doc at Purdue University.
Yichi and Mark are co-authors of the paper “Measurement Invariance of the Neurobehavioral Symptom Inventory in Male and Female Million Veteran Program Enrollees Completing the Comprehensive Traumatic Brain Injury Evaluation” in press in Hormones and Behavior. This paper applies measurement invariance analysis and quantifies the impact of gender on classification accuracy.
Mark co-authored the article titled “Sedentary Behavior and Incident Dementia Among Older Adults” in JAMA.

Mark is promoted to Associate Professor of Psychology at USC with tenure.
Yichi completed an internship at Pearson on evaluation of reliability indices for automated scoring algorithms.
Meltem completed an Data and Statistical Sciences internship at Genentech in which she explored the interval level treatment of ordinal patient reported outcome (survey) data in clinical trials.
Meltem received her MA in Psychology from USC.

Yichi presented a project titled “Alignment with Bayesian Region of Measurement Equivalence (ABROME) Approach for Multiple Groups Comparisons” in IMPS.
Winnie presented a project titled “Addressing Publication Bias and Uncertainty for Power Analysis: A Hybrid Classical-Bayesian Approach” in IMPS.
Jimmy presented “Modeling Latent Interaction Effects: A Two-Stage Path Analysis Approach (2S-PA)” in EAM.

Winnie presented a paper titled “Addressing Uncertainty in Power Analysis for Designing Cluster Randomized Trials” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2023 Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Yichi presented a paper titled “Investigating Measurement Invariance in NAEP Student Questionnaire Index Items” at the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) 2023 Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Yichi presented a poster titled “An empirical Bayes cluster-mean approach to correct for sampling error in between-cluster effects” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2023 Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Winnie received the Excellence in Scientific Writing in the Psychology Department at USC.
Jimmy presented his project titled “A Systematic Review of Measurement Invariance Research of the CES-D across Gender” at the poster party.

Mark has a co-authored article titled “The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Therapy Utilization Among Racially/Ethnically and Socio-Economically Diverse Autistic Children,” in press in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The first author is Cassie Gonzalez who is a graduate researcher at USC, and she applies multilevel modeling in this work.

Winnie and Yichi passed their qualifying exams and defended their dissertation proposals. Congratulations to Winnie and Yichi!

Mark is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Scientist Award and starts the funded project in September. Congratulations to Mark!
Meltem presented a poster titled “Evaluating the Effectiveness and Equity of Court Interventions to Reduce Involvement with the Criminal Justice System” at the Learning & Doing Data for Good (LDDG) Conference at the University of Washington.

Meltem was selected as a Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Fellow and completed the 3-month full-time DSSG fellowship at Carnegie Mellon which aims to “train aspiring data scientists to work on machine learning, data science, and AI projects with social impact in a fair and equitable manner.”

We welcomed our fourth graduate student Meltem Ozcan to the lab.
Mark authored article titled “Adjusting for Measurement Noninvariance with Alignment in Growth Modeling” in journal Multivariate Behavioral Research.

Winnie and Yichi presented posters at the International Meeting of Psychometric Society (IMPS) online.

MMM lab established.
We welcomed our first two graduate students Winnie Tse and Yichi Zhang to the lab.