Ryan Bowles

@ryanpbowles.bsky.social

Applied quantitative methodologist at Michigan State University. To statisticians, I'm an early literacy researcher. To early literacy researchers, I'm a statistician.

A Likert scale is always some form of Disagree to Agree rating scale. It is a type of rating scale, not synonymous with rating scale. This is a hill I will not die on, because I have given up and have nothing left but to scream into the Bluesky void.

Underappreciated fact: „When the entire population is measured there is no need to perform a hypothesis test. After all, there is no pop. to generalize to. When data from the entire pop. has been collected the pop. effect size is known, and there is no confidence interval to compute.“

How much different do two samples need to be for factorial in invariance to be meaningful validity evidence? For example, randomly splitting a sample in two and finding factorial invariance is definitely not meaningful validity evidence.

I taught a lecture on IRT today, and I have to say that even after 25 years in the field, I don't really get it. In the absence of a causal theory of the response process, what can IRT really say about measurement and validity?

I changed my email signature to "Best Linear Unbiased Wishes, Ryan" months ago and I just finally got the second comment from a recipient. Perhaps I'm emailing with the wrong kind of people.

The next MSU HDFS Methods speaker is Daniel Cooper. His talk is "Using qualitative research to inform a culturally relevant parenting intervention". The talk is on zoom on 4/16 at 11 am Eastern time. The talk is open to anyone. Email me (bowlesr@msu.edu) for connection info.

The next MSU HDFS Methods talk is Tu Apr 2 at 11 Eastern time on zoom. Robert Wickham from Northern Arizona U will speak on "Introducing a Framework for Modeling Dyadic Discrepancy". All are welcome. Contact bowlesr@msu.edu for more information.

I'll be teaching a course on measurement focused on internal structure validation methods (FA, IRT, Rasch). Need to update syllabus and readings. Any recommendations? Example syllabi?

Michigan St U Dept of Human Development and Family Studies has an online methods speaker series. Next talk is 3/19, 11am, and features Denis Dumas from UGA on "When do human raters disagree? An important question to ask before supervised models are trained." Open to all. bowlesr@msu.edu for details