Università degli Studi di Cagliari

Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione

Dipartimento di Pedagogia, Psicologia, Filosofia

Programma Visiting Professor 2011, finanziato dalla Regione Autonoma della Sardegna

3 Maggio 2012, dalle ore 9.30 alle ore 13.00, Aula Specchi - Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione

Prof. Alexandre J. S. Morin

Department of Psychology, University of Sherbrooke

“Research perspectives: Studying developmental heterogeneity and non linearity in psychological health and wellbeing trhrough substantive-methodological synergies”.

Utilizzando come cornice di riferimento, il concetto di sinergia tra aspetti sostanziali e metodologici, il seminario verterà sull’uso di tecniche di analisi dati avanzate, quali i mixture models, per la comprensione di problematiche legate a benessere e salute.

Il seminario sarà in lingua inglese. Per facilitare la fruizione dell’argomento, il seminario del Prof. Morin verrà preceduto da alcune brevi presentazioni teoriche, in italiano, di inquadramento della problematica e da un intervento conclusivo di discussione critica.

Abstract

Research perspectives: Studying developmental heterogeneity and non linearity in psychological health and wellbeing through substantive-methodological synergies.

Over the past ten years, Dr Morin has studied Psychological Health and Well-Being from multiple perspectives, encompassing organizational and developmental psychology, as well as both the positive (self esteem, commitment, etc.) and negative (depression, anxiety, etc.) sides of the psychological health and well being continuum. In addition to this substantive interest, his research also encompasses a strong methodological component that converges with recent recommendations (Borsboom, 2006; Marsh & Hau, 2007) advocating the need for substantive-methodological synergies (SMS) in psychological research. SMS, which are at the core of his research interests, represent joint ventures in which new methodological developments are applied to substantively important issues and offer a unique, creative, and more precise way of analyzing psychological phenomenon.
Recent advances in the field of statistical data modeling have been impressive and linked, in part, to the development of Muthén’s (2002) general latent variable modeling framework and of the related user friendly statistical package Mplus. In the presentation, Dr Morin will illustrate what these advances may mean in term of longitudinal and categorical data modeling through five empirical illustrations, four of which based on the same data set from the Montréal Adolescent Depression Development project, a 4 years, 6 time-points, prospective longitudinal study of over 1000 adolescents having just experienced the transition to high school. The first study was designed to explore the longitudinal evolution and interrelations between global self esteem and perceived physical appearance through conditional multivariate autoregressive latent trajectory analyses (Bollen & Curran, 2006). Then, to illustrate cross-sectional mixture modeling, he will move to a study of workplace organizational commitment. Then, the next three studies will be used to illustrate the use of growth mixture models (Muthén & Shedden, 1999). In the third study, growth mixture models will be used to portray the stability/instability of adolescents, anxiety trajectories. This study will allow him to illustrate: (a) the limitations of Nagin (1999) more simple latent class growth analysis and of Mplus default method; (b) the choice of the “best” solution in the presence of estimation problems and of unclear guidelines from the “fit” indicators; (c) the usefulness of Mplus Auxiliary (e) function. The fourth study will illustrate the complexity of growth mixture models including outcomes and predictors of GPA trajectories and the various steps that could be followed to converge on a final parsimonious model. Finally, a last study will present an alternative non-linear parameterization of growth mixture model and address the inclusion of interaction effects among the predictors, as well as methods in order to control for school effects when the number of school is suboptimal.

Biographical note

Dr Alexandre Morin defines himself as a lifespan developmental psychologist with broad research interests anchored in the exploration of the social determinants of psychological wellbeing and psychopathologies at various life stages. Most of his research is anchored in a substantive-methodological synergy framework and thus represent joint ventures in which new methodological developments are applied to substantively important issues. He has authored or co-authored 48 articles that have been published (or are in press/accepted) in peer reviewed scientific journals, along with 6 peer-reviewed book chapters and over 100 conference publications