Socio-cognitive difficulties in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are heterogenuous and often co-occur with irritability symptoms, such as angry/grouchy mood and temper outbursts. However, the specific relations between individual symptoms are not well-represented in conventional methods analyzing aggregated autistic symptoms and ASD…

The latent growth model (LGM) is a popular tool in the social and behavioral sciences to study development processes of continuous and discrete outcome variables. A special case are frequency measurements of behaviors or events, such as doctor visits per month or crimes committed per year. Probability distributions for such outcomes include the…

The current study compares estimates of peer influence from an analytic approach that explicitly address network processes with those from traditional approaches that do not. Using longitudinal network data from the PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience peers project, we obtain estimates of social influence on…

Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a…

How researchers use statistical analyses shapes their research toward or away from an anti-racist agenda. In this article, we demonstrate how developmental scientists can use the QuantCrit framework to critically examine the process of conducting quantitative analyses. In particular, we focus on mixture modeling to clearly demonstrate how the…

Longitudinal measurement enables the examination of behavioral or psychological change. One approach to examining longitudinal measurements is the use of latent growth curve modeling (LGCM). This approach affords the assessment of inter- and intraindividual change. Yet, this approach likely is underused in exercise science. The purpose of the…

Aggressive behaviour is a significant issue for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet our understanding is limited compared to aggression in typically developing populations. This study examined behavioural, adaptive and cognitive data provided by the Simons Simplex Collection (N = 2184) to identify behavioural subgroups in children…

We address measurement error bias in propensity score (PS) analysis due to covariates that are latent variables. In the setting where latent covariate X is measured via multiple error-prone items W, PS analysis using several proxies for X--the W items themselves, a summary score (mean/sum of the items), or the conventional factor score (i.e.,…

Analysts of discrete data often face the challenge of managing the tendency of inflation on certain values. When treated improperly, such phenomenon may lead to biased estimates and incorrect inferences. This study extends the existing literature on single-value inflated models and develops a general framework to handle variables with more than…

The aim of the study was to examine the changes in the acute blood lactate levels of elite taekwondo players when carrying out high-intensity interval training on Spinning® bikes. Twenty elite-level taekwondo athletes participated in the study. The subjects were selected from athletes who had been competitors for at least six years. Their average…

The major aim of this manuscript is to bring together two important topics that have recently received much attention in child and adolescent research, albeit separately from each other: single-case experimental designs and statistical mediation analysis. Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) are increasingly recognized as a valuable…

In order to investigate causality in situations where random assignment is not possible, propensity scores can be used in regression adjustment, stratification, inverse-probability treatment weighting, or matching. The basic concepts behind propensity scores have been extensively described. When data are longitudinal or missing, the estimation and…

Identifying mediators in variable chains as part of a causal mediation analysis can shed light on issues of causation, assessment, and intervention. However, coefficients and effect sizes in a causal mediation analysis are nearly always small. This can lead those less familiar with the approach to reject the results of causal mediation analysis.…

Measurement invariance is a prerequisite when comparing different groups of individuals or when studying a group of individuals across time. This assures that the same construct is assessed without measurement artifacts. This investigation applied a novel approach of simultaneous parameter linking to cross-sectional and longitudinal measures of…

The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of cannabis and amphetamine use and associated factors among adolescents in nine African countries. We analyzed cross-sectional data from 25,372 adolescents (mean age 14.3 years, SD = 1.6) from nine African countries that participated in the Global School-Based Student Health Survey (GSHS) in…