Structural Equation Modeling foR Psychologists

_{Last updated 2020-10-30.}

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, Spring, 2019). 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 3.6 or above).
2. RStudio IDE (optional, but recommended).
3. The following packages, listed by lesson:

You can install all the packages used by running:

# in alphabetical order:

pkgs <- c(
  "bayestestR", "car", "dplyr", "ggplot2", "lavaan", "nFactors",
  "parameters", "psych", "psychTools", "semPlot", "semTools", "tidyr",
  "tidySEM"
)

install.packages(pkgs, dependencies = TRUE)

Other Useful Resources

• lavaan toutorials.
• Sacha Epskamp’s online course and YouTube lectures.
• Michael Hallquist’s course.