Blocktalk Psychology - Marieke Timmerman : WHY A PRIORI GROUPING WRONGS THE INDIVIDUAL AND HOW TO DO A BETTER JOB

We’re excited to announce that the second Blocktalk & Blockborrel of the academic year, organized by the Psychology Department - University of Groningen and Mindwise is coming on Thursday 2nd of February, 2017! This time, we welcome Marieke Timmerman, professor in the Psychometrics and Statistics group.

Psychological research often involves a comparison of natural groups - for example contrasting a specific patient sample with a community sample, or contrasting samples with varying socioeconomic status. In the statistical analysis, the default approach to comparing the groups is to use group membership as a predictor. This approach is useful to identify whether group membership matters for the outcome variable(s) of interest. However, it falls short in identifying individual differences within the natural groups.

In this Blocktalk, Marieke will present latent class analysis as a useful and feasible alternative that does justice to individual differences, while still allowing for examining relationships with group membership. As will be discussed, the method is useful for many different types of data, including longitudinal data, and data involving different outcomes that are to be analysed jointly. The core issues and the insights that can be achieved, will be explained by means of a longitudinal study towards individual courses of emotion dysregulation problems, stress and ADHD-symptoms across the adolescence.

Marieke’s talk will start at 16:30 in the Kouwerzaal and will be followed by the opportunity to ask questions or discuss the topic further. Afterwards, at 17:30, there is a borrel in the Orangerie (the new canteen on Grote Rozenstraat 19) with drinks.