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In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

A 2-Day Seminar Taught by Paul Allison, Ph.D.

For the past eight years, Professor Paul Allison has been teaching his acclaimed two-day seminars on Longitudinal Data Analysis Using SAS and Longitudinal Data Analysis Using Stata. In this new seminar he takes up where those courses leave off, with methods for analyzing panel data using software for structural equation modeling (SEM).

Panel data have two big attractions for making causal inferences with non-experimental data:

• The ability to control for unobserved, time-invariant confounders.
• The ability to determine the direction of causal relationships.

Fixed effects methods that control for unobserved confounders are now well known and widely used. Cross-lagged panel models have long been used to study the direction of causality. But trying to combine these two approaches poses serious problems.

To deal with these difficulties, econometricians have developed the Arellano-Bond methods for estimating dynamic panel data models. However, Arellano-Bond is known to be statistically inefficient and can also be severely biased in important situations.

Professor Allison has recently shown that dynamic panel models can easily be estimated by maximum likelihood with SEM software (ML-SEM). His recent work demonstrates that the performance of ML-SEM is superior to the econometric methods. Plus, ML-SEM offers better capabilities for handling missing data, evaluating model fit, relaxing constraints, and allowing for non-normal data.

This seminar takes a deep dive into the ML-SEM method for estimating dynamic panel models, exploring the ins and outs of assumptions, model specification, software programming, model evaluation and interpretation of results. We’ll work through several real data sets in great detail, testing out alternative methods and working toward an optimal solution.

This is an applied course with a minimal number of formulas and a maximal number of examples. Although the methodology is cutting edge, the emphasis is on how to actually do the analysis in order accomplish your objectives.

It’s also a hands-on course with lots of opportunities to practice the methods, including at least two hours of carefully-designed and supervised exercises using real data. You are strongly encouraged to bring your own data and try out the new methods. 

Four different software packages will be used to demonstrate the methods: Mplus, SAS, Stata and the new lavaan package for R. Program code for all four packages will be presented for each example, whenever possible.

At the end of this seminar, you should be able to confidently apply the ML-SEM method for dynamic panel data to your own research projects. You will also have a thorough understanding of the rationale, assumptions, and interpretation of these methods.

CAUTION: This is not a survey course but rather an intensive study of a specific methodology—one that has enormous potential for improving causal inference from panel data. This seminar does NOT cover several popular methods that use SEM to analyze panel data, including:

• Latent growth curve models
• Latent trajectory models
• Common factor models

The methods covered in this course are NOT typically useful in analyzing data from randomized experiments. That’s because dynamic panel models are designed for situations in which the predictor variables of central interest vary over time. These methods are also not designed for prediction—rather, the goal is to maximize the ability to make valid causal inference. To use these methods, you need panel data with at least three time points, and the number of individuals should be substantially larger than the number of time points.