Lab for Developmental and Health Research Methodology
Overview of our research
Our lab aims to develop and apply statistical methods in the areas of developmental and health research.
Current Members
Undergraduate research opportunity
If you are interested in joining the DHRM lab and an undergraduate student at Notre Dame, send the following to either ZhiyongZhang (at) nd.edu or LijuangWang (at) nd.edu:
Recent/Ongoing Projects
Bayesian structural equation modeling (SEM)
Longitudinal study design
Peggy Wang & Johnny Zhang
We investigate how to plan the sample size for a longitudinal study - power analysis. We evaluate how the sample size, the number of measurement occasions, and missing data influence the power of a longitudinal study.
Longitudinal mediation analysis
Peggy Wang, Johnny Zhang, & Ryne Estabrook
Mediation analysis is a methodological tool for testing the impact of variables on existing statistical effects. We propose a variation of the longitudinal mediation model by Cole and Maxwell (2003), tailored for the study of intervention research. We then apply several variations of our longitudinal intervention model to data from the ACTIVE study (Jobe et al., 2001) to test whether the impact of training on cognitively demanding everyday tasks is mediated by reasoning ability. The resulting model allows for testing of the training and mediation effects, as well as assumptions of stationarity that allow for more parsimonious model selection and inference on the long-term effect of the intervention.