John Sakaluk
johnsakaluk.bsky.social
John Sakaluk
@johnsakaluk.bsky.social
He/him/his. Associate Professor at Western University.
Work: #rstats, #psychometrics, #dyadic data, #MetaAnalysis, #closerelationships, Sexuality
Fun: All things cured, fermented, roasted, seared, smoked, shaken, stirred, and swizzled.
Pinned
🧵
Very excited (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social) to share our preprint tutorial for using our R 📦 dySEM for #dyadic data analysis with latent variables, in cross-sectional data sets.

This paper has been literal years in the making, and provides three distinct tutorials.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Academic developer friends: anyone with direct experience submitting to Journal of Open Source Software and willing to share their thoughts on it as an outlet?
November 6, 2025 at 6:40 PM
YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BONNIE!
October 15, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
So much of your career chances are determined by whether you are working with a successful and supportive team.

I.e. Whether you are working with a line manager or mentor who hands down opportunities. Coauthorships on papers. Coapplicants on grant.

If you're not being given these, you MUST move.
October 14, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Over the last 3 years I've been collecting resources to share with people interested in data freelancing. I've recently compiled those resources in a GitHub Repository.

If you are interested in data freelancing, these resources may help you navigate that transition.

github.com/Cghlewis/fre...
GitHub - Cghlewis/freelancing_resources: Resources for data freelancers
Resources for data freelancers. Contribute to Cghlewis/freelancing_resources development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
October 14, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
This is how it's done: put the truth right there in the headline and sub headline.
October 8, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Looking for textbooks that did a good job walking out sum-to-zero coding (aka effect coding) versus treatment coding (aka dummy coding). Favorites?
October 1, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Had missed this absolutely brilliant paper. They take a widely used social media addiction scale & replace 'social media' with 'friends'. The resulting scale has great psychometric properties & 69% of people have friend addictions.

link.springer.com/article/10.3...
Development of an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ): Are most people really social addicts? - Behavior Research Methods
A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.
link.springer.com
October 1, 2025 at 11:33 AM
I'm confident Florence's union will have something to say about this, but censorship wins when we all wait for the bureaucratic process to play out without registering our malcontent in other more immediate ways of protesting. Academics have tools/levers to do this, if they would but use them.
"Why would it bow to antidemocratic pressures by placing a professor on leave without their request, consent, or involvement? That any university would do this is beyond comprehension and is cause for alarm about the future of academic freedom in Canada."
What Happened to the University’s Commitment to Free Expression? Charley Kirk, uAlberta, and Me | Centre for Free Expression
I was shocked when the University of Alberta administration informed me, one of its law professors, that I was being placed on non-disciplinary leave for my social media comments in the wake of Charli...
cfe.torontomu.ca
September 29, 2025 at 3:12 PM
The gospel truth of this is beyond my paygrade, but this 🧵 illuminated a few interesting patterns to me:

The first is that, though the credibility discourse has brought a lot of attention to theory, a lot of its arguments and tools (incl. one's I've used) lean heavily into dustbowl empiricism.
Simonsohn has now posted a blog response to our recent paper about the poor statistical properties of the P curve. @clintin.bsky.social and I are finishing up a less-technical paper that will serve as a response. But I wanted to address a meta-issue *around* this that may clarify some things. 1/x
Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it?
datacolada.org/129
September 25, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Academic friends: what software or approaches are you using these days to keep track of your/your students' research projects? On sabbatical and needing some systems to stay in the know of how students' stuff is progressing. Don't want something super hardcore, but tracking stage/keeping notes, etc.
September 24, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
"How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner" by Annie Mueller 😅 😂 😭

anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-...
How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog
“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!)  and I like working with ...
anniemueller.com
September 23, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Tidy simulation: Designing robust, reproducible, and scalable Monte Carlo simulations #StatsSky
arxiv.org/abs/2509.11741
It is not formally linked to the {tidyverse}, bit affinity is obvious.
The paper does a solid job in describing the simulation workflow, could be useful for intros to simulation
September 23, 2025 at 9:25 AM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
These fuckin' losers bent over backwards to give a standing ovation for a dude that said it was morally good to stone gay people to death but won't let a group opposing genocide perform.

Really earning my vote next time around.
www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...
Prominent Irish rap group Kneecap barred from entering Canada, MP says
Irish rap group Kneecap has been barred from entering Canada, according to a post from Toronto MP Vince Gasparro.
www.ctvnews.ca
September 19, 2025 at 2:41 PM
I've long been curious, and never attended, but my immediate and deep FOMO from all the initial #PositConf2025 posts. makes me feel like I have to make it a point to try to attend in 2026...
September 17, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Jonathan McPherson just mentioned datapasta at the opening keynote of #positconf, so I'm sharing this once again to share the magic, for all those discovering it for the very first time ❤️

#databs #rstats
🍝 A package I love, {datapasta}, came up at #CascadiaRconf this weekend, so I wanted to share a little example of it in action. It's an addin (but also a pkg w/ some funcs), so showing is better than sharing code. Thanks for the awesome pkg, @milesmcbain.bsky.social! #rstats #databs
September 17, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Do you want to get serious about specifying your random-effect structures? This paper might be for you.. plus lots of good stuff about multilevel and dyadic modeling: doi.org/10.1177/2515...
A Practical Guide to Specifying Random Effects in Longitudinal Dyadic Multilevel Modeling - Kareena S. del Rosario, Tessa V. West, 2025
Analyzing over-time dyadic data can be challenging, particularly when using multilevel models with complex random-effect structures. In this tutorial, we discus...
doi.org
September 17, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Interested in simulating the kind of data that you might commonly find in evolutionary and ecological studies?

Then we have the R package for you - squidSim!!

Check our new preprint:
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
squidSim: a flexible R package for structured and reproducible simulations in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
ecoevorxiv.org
September 15, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
For potential grad students: if you're interested in this kind of work on assessing and improving close relationships measures, our group just got a grant to do five more years of it. Join our team!
September 11, 2025 at 3:12 PM
When considering the moving to UWO, the opportunity to have Sam as a colleague in SPDP, and work with her, was a huge draw. And I'll never forget how agitated her award-winning address--where she first laid these ideas out--left the audience. Incredibly proud to see this work out and play a role.
Shoutout to my talented coauthors @johnsakaluk.bsky.social, James Kim, @davekhera.bsky.social, Helena Qin and @sarahcestanton.bsky.social.
September 10, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
In a new paper, my colleagues and I set out to demonstrate how method biases can create spurious findings in relationship science, by using a seemingly meaningless scale (e.g., "My relationship has very good Saturn") to predict relationship outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships - Samantha Joel, John K. Sakaluk, James J. Kim, Devinder Khera, Helena Yuchen Qin, Sarah C. E. Stanton, 2025
Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Y...
journals.sagepub.com
September 10, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Our preprint for #dyadic SEM tutorial with {dySEM} is back up/available!

Thanks to @psyarxivbot.bsky.social team quickly retooling their approach (and the thankless work of the mods) to help sift the real from the slop!
🧵
Very excited (w/ @omarjcamanto.bsky.social) to share our preprint tutorial for using our R 📦 dySEM for #dyadic data analysis with latent variables, in cross-sectional data sets.

This paper has been literal years in the making, and provides three distinct tutorials.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
September 10, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
"63% rate of likely AI-generated responses" on mTurk

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
September 10, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
My latest piece, on apprenticeship, artificial intelligence, and intrinsic motivation. Handcrafted from the heart.

Please, share and enjoy.

open.substack.com/pub/robchave...
A Vibe Coder's Millennium
I got my first home computer in late 2000 when I was in the middle of 10th grade.
open.substack.com
September 9, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Reposted by John Sakaluk
Once again, @davisvaughan.bsky.social's extrachecks have saved me from a likely CRAN rejection for an upcoming #RStats package submission. Thanks Davis! github.com/DavisVaughan...
GitHub - DavisVaughan/extrachecks
Contribute to DavisVaughan/extrachecks development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
September 3, 2025 at 7:57 PM