We have a young
relative who was a lecturer in Psychology at a university in a province in
central Myanmar about a year ago. He was interested in learning data analysis
and I promised to help him. Later he was lucky to be transferred to a
university in Yangon and came to see me again a month ago. Then I urged him to
get hold of a laptop, and a cell phone (he already has one) to serve as a
mobile hotspot for internet connection. As a complement to this combination or alternately
as a second rate option, I urged him to use the computer facilities and
internet access available in his university.
He hasn't come back
yet. May be he has changed his priorities. May be quantitative analysis is not
that important for his work, or may be there are other reasons.
Meanwhile, I started
assembling a very rudimentary kit consisting of core data analysis software (The R Statistical Environment software
with a few additional packages for quantitative psychology) and some reference materials on
Psychometrics, about R, some statistical text, and list of resources on the Web. I also wrote down my intention and
rationale in a README file. Then I burned them onto a CD and this has not been
claimed yet. The following is an excerpt from this file:
A few words of explanation
This is an attempt to expose Myanmar Psychometricians (who
are not familiar with R) to the power of the R statistical environment. R is
very powerful and completely free. We no longer need to rely on pirated copies
of SPSS or SAS or STATA software to do complex statistical analyses.
R is said to have a steep learning curve. This is mostly a
myth. I am not much more than a beginner in R, but I taught myself to do useful
things with R without too much trouble!
Besides, there are a lot of introductory R courses and
tutorials on the Internet. I have collected some material that I think would be
relevant for Psychometrics. My collection may be too deficient for the
psycho-professionals and academics, so I urge them to discard what they don't
need and add what is useful.
My sole purpose is to stimulate awareness of a powerful set
of statistical tools for the data analysts in various fields. If you are
interested, I hope that my collection here would help induce you to go on and
learn R by yourselves. Towards that end, you are free to share all the material
on this CD. You will see that apart from tidbits on Psychometrics and R, I have
included the R program and a few packages relating to Psychometrics.
As for myself, lack of opportunities has driven me to be an
autodidact to some extent. I learnt a few things I know about personal
computers, data analysis, and R mainly via this route. So, based on my
experience and some whiffs of imagination I would recommend the following to
get started with R.
(i) Get some idea of what R could do. There are lots of
materials on the Web for this. Don't search for "R". Try "cran
R" or "cran r".
(ii) Get more specific idea of what package(s) would suit
your work. R has the base package and packages that do specialized statistical
work. You could search on the Web like "Psychometrics with R",
"GLM with R", "Factor analysis with R", etc. If there is a
specific data analysis task in hand, you will not miss some R package(s) that
would do it for you. The more organized way to find out which package suits
which data analysis task is to look at the "Task Views". I'm giving a structural view of that below:
CRAN Task View: Psychometric Models and Methods
|
Maintainer:
|
Patrick
Mair
|
|
Contact:
|
mair
at fas.harvard.edu
|
|
Version:
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2014-10-25
|
Psychometrics
is concerned with theory and techniques of psychological measurement.
Psychometricians have also worked collaboratively with those in the field of statistics
and quantitative methods to develop improved ways to organize, analyze, and
scale corresponding data. Since much functionality is already contained in base
R and there is considerable overlap between tools for psychometry and tools
described in other views, particularly in SocialSciences,
we only give a brief overview of packages that are closely related to
psychometric methodology.
Please let me know if I have
omitted something of importance, or if a new package or function should be
mentioned here.
Item Response Theory (IRT):
- The eRm package
fits extended Rasch models, i.e. the ordinary Rasch model for...
- The package ltm also
fits the simple RM. Additionally, functions for estimating...
- TAM fits
unidimensional and multidimensional item response models and also...
. . . . . .
- WrightMap provides
graphical tools for plotting item-person maps.
Correspondence Analysis (CA):
- The package ca comprises
two parts, one for simple correspondence analysis and ...
- Simple and canonical CA are
provided by the package anacor.
It allows for ...
. . . . . .
- SVD based multivariate
exploratory methods such as PCA, CA, MCA (as well ...
Structural Equation Models, Factor Analysis, PCA:
- Ordinary factor analysis (FA) is the package stats as
function factanal(). Principal...
- The sem package
fits general (i.e., latent-variable) SEMs by FIML, and structural...
. . . . . .
- The MplusAutomation package
allows to automate latent variable model estimation and interpretation
using Mplus.
Multidimensional Scaling (MDS):
- The smacof package
provides the following approaches of multidimensional scaling...
- The PTAk package
provides a multiway method to decompose a tensor (array) of ...
. . . . . .
- The package MLDS allows
for the computation of maximum likelihood ...
Classical Test Theory (CTT):
- The CTT package
can be used to perform a variety of tasks and analyses ...
- Functions for correlation
theory, meta-analysis (validity generalization), ...
. . . . . .
- QME (not on CRAN) computes
measures from generalizability theory.
Knowledge Structure Analysis:
- DAKS provides
functions and example datasets for the psychometric theory of ...
- The kst package
contains basic functionality to generate, handle, and manipulate ...
Other Related Packages:
- The psychotools provides
an infrastructure for psychometric modeling such as ...
- Recursive partitioning based on
psychometric models, employing the general MOB...
. . . . . .
- The TestScorer package
provides a GUI for entering test items and obtaining raw ...
CRAN packages:
... ...
Related links:
. . . . . .
In the "CRAN packages" listed above I've counted
119 packages to take care of your specific needs of Psychometric analysis. If
you are interested, download the software and packages you want and march on
...
(iii) Before doing that, you need to know how to get to a
"mirror" site. I have consistently used the Singapore mirror: http://cran.stat.nus.edu.sg/. Use it
and once you are at that home page, use contents of left pane to navigate.
(iv) Get some exposure
I always liked titles like XXXXX for Dummies for myself and other beginners (no offence
intended), but for R they don't have it free. Now try these. Look promising
(haven't read them myself, though):
Do it yourself Introduction to
R (2014)
Teach Yourself R (2008)
(v) On psychometric theory
Don't know anything. But this looks good—An introduction to psychometric theory with
R available at: http://www.personality-project.org/r/book/
.
Author William Ravelle explains in his overview:
This page is devoted to teaching others about
psychometric theory as well as R. It consists of chapters of an in progress
text as well as various short courses on R.
The e-book is a work in progress. Chapters
will appear sporadically. Parts of it are from the draft of a book being
prepared for the Springer series on using R, other parts are just interesting
tid-bits that would not be appropriate as chapters.
It is written in the hope that I can instill
in a new generation of psychologists the love for quantitative methodology
imparted to me by reading the popular and then later the scientific texts of
Ray Cattell [Cattell, 1966b] and Hans Eysenck [Eysenck, 1964, Eysenck, 1953,
Eysenck, 1965]. Those Penguin and Pelican paperbacks by Cattell and Eysenck
were the first indications that I had that it was possible to study personality
and psychology with a quantitative approach.
For orientation you may like to visit: http://www.personality-project.org/index.html
A lazy concluding remark:
As of today the complete list of R Task
Views is as shown in the table below. Look in the category of your choice; modify
the text above appropriately and voila! you'll get an introduction tailored to
your need.
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