Traditionally, the majority of studies investigating the effectiveness of interventions focused on the average effect, but there is much more to learn about the effects of a treatment or an intervention. Researchers are for example interested in heterogeneity of effects, in subgroup effects, or in conditional effects given values of one or multiple covariates. In addition, there is interest and need for visualizing the effects of interventions and in making the key findings from intervention studies usable for selecting the best treatment for a concrete person. In personalized medicine and related fields, attention is shifting towards estimation of interindividual differences in effects and there is a variety of statistical approaches that can be used for this purpose. However, the investigation of conditional effects and interindividual differences in the effects is particularly challenging in the social and behavioral sciences, because many constructs-of-interest such as depression or anxiety are latent variables. In addition, the selection of variables for the analysis is crucial, and modeling conditional effects oftentimes requires interactions and potentially non-linear relationships. In this keynote, I will bring together concepts from the causal inference literature and from structural equation modeling to allow researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of interventions based on latent variable models. I will use causality conditions and effect definitions from the causal inference literature and show how multigroup structural equation models with stochastic group sizes can be used to estimate the effects of interest in experimental and quasi-experimental studies. The new approach (and the accompanying open source R package) is termed EffectLiteR approach Several empirical examples from psychology and educational science are used to illustrate the proposed approach. Furthermore, I will show that many popular methods like ANOVA or moderation analysis are special cases of the general multigroup SEM approach for analyzing treatment effects. A SEM-based approach also has the advantage that many recent advancements that have been made in this area, like robust estimators and standard errors, modern fit statistics, and measurement models can be used for estimating causal effects. Finally, I will show some extensions of the proposed model, namely how to include propensity scores in the analysis, how it can be extended to multilevel SEM approaches and how Bayesian non-linear structural equation models can be used to deal with latent interactions and non-normally distributed latent variables.

In longitudinal modeling, maximum likelihood estimators of model parameters are consistent if missingness depends only on the covariates and/or observed outcomes. Such missingness processes are hence ignorable. When missingness depends on unobserved outcomes or on the random effects in mixed effects/multilevel models, it is said to be not missing at random (NMAR) and is no longer ignorable. For such NMAR missingness, joint modeling of the outcomes and missingness has been advocated, but these approaches rely on strong, unverifiable assumptions, such as parameteric specification of the missingness process. In this talk, I will show that minimal assumptions about missingness, such as whether it depends on random effects or contemporaneous observed/unobserved outcomes, often allows us to make the missingness ignorable. In other words, we can obtain consistent estimates of (some) model parameters using standard estimators, a concept also referred to as "protective" estimation. Perhaps surprisingly, one approach is to simply discard more data. Another approach is to change the estimator, for example, by switching from a random-effects model to a fixed-effects model (Skrondal & Rabe-Hesketh, 2014, Biometrika 101, 175-188). This is joint work with Anders Skrondal.

Replication is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method and is central to the rhetoric of science. Yet recent empirical research has called into question the replicability of experimental research in fields as diverse as economics, medicine, and psychology. This work undermines the credibility of science and the evidence science provides. Surprisingly, there has been little research on the methodology of replication itself, including the design of replication studies and appropriate statistical analyses to determine whether a set of studies replicate one another. Perhaps as a result, some recent programs of research on replication have used multiple, and sometimes mutually contradictory, methods to study replication. This talk will draw on a meta-analytic perspective to formalize ideas about the definition of replication and the analysis of replication studies. I will focus on three problems that seem straightforward, but will argue that each of them is more complex than it first appears. One is the precise definition of replication: What exactly does it mean to say that the results of a set of studies replicate one another? The second is the statistical analysis of replications: Given a definition of replication, what statistical analysis is appropriate? The third is the design of replication studies: What kind of ensemble of two or more studies should we assemble to evaluate whether results replicate?