Shawn Hemelstrand
@shawn-hemelstrand.bsky.social
I am a psycholinguist who studies literacy at KIMEP University. I also share R and methods tips. I offer a free course on R programming at Quantfish here:
https://www.goquantfish.com/courses/gentle-intro-to-R
https://www.goquantfish.com/courses/gentle-intro-to-R
My paper on dichotomizing continuous data for language research is now published online. I urge all language researchers to read about this subject if they have not already done so.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Stop splitting hairs: The problems with dichotomizing continuous data in language research
It is common in the language sciences to dichotomize continuous data in order to fit models to data. However, several statisticians and methodologists…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 18, 2025 at 9:27 AM
My paper on dichotomizing continuous data for language research is now published online. I urge all language researchers to read about this subject if they have not already done so.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Check out this cool redesign for OSF coming soon. I've always secretly wondered if some people don't adopt pre-registration because the websites are not always user-friendly. The tabulated headers here are a great step forward for making it easier to navigate.
We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:
September 6, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Check out this cool redesign for OSF coming soon. I've always secretly wondered if some people don't adopt pre-registration because the websites are not always user-friendly. The tabulated headers here are a great step forward for making it easier to navigate.
Nice R way to backup your Qualtrics.
Need to backup your Qualtrics?
I needed this urgently given a revocation of my Qualtrics account with my former affiliation.
Found William Ryan's R code, but it didn't work for me, so I made some tweaks, and it works now.
Hope it's helpful to others:
github.com/giladfeldman...
I needed this urgently given a revocation of my Qualtrics account with my former affiliation.
Found William Ryan's R code, but it didn't work for me, so I made some tweaks, and it works now.
Hope it's helpful to others:
github.com/giladfeldman...
GitHub - giladfeldman/qualtrics_backup: A very simple script for backing up all your data and .qsf files from Qualtrics (bug fixes)
A very simple script for backing up all your data and .qsf files from Qualtrics (bug fixes) - giladfeldman/qualtrics_backup
github.com
September 1, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Nice R way to backup your Qualtrics.
There have been quite a few recent SEM articles on issues with fit indices that are worth reading. One that just came out this month by McNeish provides a broad review about the issues surrounding fit indices, which every SEM user should read:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
How Do Psychologists Determine Whether a Measurement Scale Is Good? A Quarter-Century of Scale Validation with Hu & Bentler (1999) | Annual Reviews
Many psychologists rely on surveys, questionnaires, and measurement scales because psychological constructs like depression, motivation, or extraversion cannot be directly measured with physical instr...
www.annualreviews.org
August 31, 2025 at 7:43 AM
There have been quite a few recent SEM articles on issues with fit indices that are worth reading. One that just came out this month by McNeish provides a broad review about the issues surrounding fit indices, which every SEM user should read:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Are frequency and complexity related in Chinese characters/words? Our analysis shows the association is negative but very weak. The article, pre-registration, and data are openly available to whoever wants to read about it. Feel free to drop a comment if you have questions.
doi.org/10.1007/s418...
doi.org/10.1007/s418...
A tale of two scripts: Applying the principle of least complexity to simplified and traditional Chinese - Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
Is there a relationship between the frequency of characters and their respective complexity? This hypothesis, which we may call the Principle of Least Complexity, was recently tested across a number o...
doi.org
August 6, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Are frequency and complexity related in Chinese characters/words? Our analysis shows the association is negative but very weak. The article, pre-registration, and data are openly available to whoever wants to read about it. Feel free to drop a comment if you have questions.
doi.org/10.1007/s418...
doi.org/10.1007/s418...
If you are curious about what Monte Carlo simulation entails, I give a very brief conceptual discussion on what it involves, as well as a linked practical example with R code:
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
Is my understanding correct about Monte Carlo simulation? (Layman Terms)
I sometimes encounter the term Monte Carlo simulation in psychology journals. I am not a statistical nerd, more like a statistics user, so even after reading quite a decent amount of material, I am...
stats.stackexchange.com
March 14, 2025 at 3:21 AM
If you are curious about what Monte Carlo simulation entails, I give a very brief conceptual discussion on what it involves, as well as a linked practical example with R code:
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
Be more intelligent about handling outliers in statistics. I discuss this issue in my recent CV post.
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
Moderation analysis assumption: univariate outliers after centering
I am conducting a moderation analysis for my thesis and am performing assumption testing.
I found a few univariate outliers and transformed any scores that were z-score of > (-)3.29. I then cont...
stats.stackexchange.com
February 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Be more intelligent about handling outliers in statistics. I discuss this issue in my recent CV post.
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...
If you're looking for an easy way to implement planned contrasts in regression (instead of post-hoc pairwise comparisons), consider using the "hypr" package, which has a very flexible method for designing contrasts before fitting to a regression:
joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
hypr: An R package for hypothesis-driven contrast coding
Rabe et al., (2020). hypr: An R package for hypothesis-driven contrast coding. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(48), 2134, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02134
joss.theoj.org
January 31, 2025 at 1:43 AM
If you're looking for an easy way to implement planned contrasts in regression (instead of post-hoc pairwise comparisons), consider using the "hypr" package, which has a very flexible method for designing contrasts before fitting to a regression:
joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
The preprint for my first methods paper is available on RG for commentary. It discusses the dangers of dichotomizing continuous data in language research. This paper used six Monte Carlo simulations to show how this impacts common models in our field.
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
January 24, 2025 at 9:48 PM
The preprint for my first methods paper is available on RG for commentary. It discusses the dangers of dichotomizing continuous data in language research. This paper used six Monte Carlo simulations to show how this impacts common models in our field.
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
www.researchgate.net/publication/...
This course (and the book that goes with it) is an absolute must for beginners of Bayesian regression modeling. I believe the book is undergoing a new edition soon, which I'm also excited about.
If you hate statistics like I do, then you'll love my free lectures. Putting science before statistics, 20 lectures from basics of inference & causal modeling to multilevel models & dynamic state space models. It's all free, made with love and sympathy. 🧪 #stats www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
January 24, 2025 at 8:54 AM
This course (and the book that goes with it) is an absolute must for beginners of Bayesian regression modeling. I believe the book is undergoing a new edition soon, which I'm also excited about.
I'm not sure how else to start my Bluesky posts, so I'll do it as any R programming enthusiast would:
print("Hello, world.")
print("Hello, world.")
January 24, 2025 at 8:11 AM
I'm not sure how else to start my Bluesky posts, so I'll do it as any R programming enthusiast would:
print("Hello, world.")
print("Hello, world.")