An Introduction to Network Psychometrics (Sacha Epskamp)

Recent years have seen a rise in the network approach to psychology: modeling human behavior as a complex system of interacting psychological, biological, and sociological components. This approach has since been utilized in various topics of psychological research, such as mental health, attitude formation and intelligence. While the approach originated from a complex systems point of view, it has since inspired new psychometric modelling frameworks that are made available in open-source and accessible software packages - Network Psychometrics. Network psychometrics is both an alternative to and complementary with traditional psychometric modeling techniques such as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). In this seminar, I will introduce network psychometrics and showcase some recent applications of psychometric network modeling, such as meta-analytic modeling of multiple datasets and separating within-person dynamics from between-person relations in longitudinal panel data.