Tidy Structural Equation Modeling

A tidy workflow for generating, estimating, reporting, and plotting structural equation models using 'lavaan', 'OpenMx', or 'Mplus'. Throughout this workflow, elements of syntax, results, and graphs are represented as 'tidy' data, making them easy to customize. Includes functionality to estimate latent class analyses, and to plot 'dagitty' and 'igraph' objects.

tidySEM

The package tidySEM provides a ‘tidy’ workflow for conducting, reporting, and plotting structural equation modeling analyses. It does not perform model estimation, but instead allows users to estimate models in a software-agnostic way, using either the free open source R packages lavaan or OpenMx, or the commercial closed-source program Mplus (controlled through the R package MplusAutomation). The aim of tidySEM is to provide three specific functions:

1. Generate model syntax in a top-down, tidy way,
   • With particular attention to specifying mixture models in OpenMx
2. Tabulate model output in a publication-ready, uniform manner,
3. Make easily customizable graphs for SEM-models.

These functions are designed with the tidy tools manifesto (Wickham, last updated 23-11-2019) in mind, and interface with the existing suite of packages in the tidyverse.

Installation

You can install the public release of tidySEM from CRAN with:

install.packages("tidySEM")

If you want access to the latest developer version, including features that may not yet be finalized, you can install the development version of tidySEM from R-universe with:

install.packages('tidySEM',
                 repos = c('https://cjvanlissa.r-universe.dev',
                           'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

And if you are a developer and want to contribute to tidySEM, or want to install a specific historical version of the package, you can install directly from GitHub with:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github('cjvanlissa/tidySEM')

Documentation

Every user-facing function in the package is documented, and the documentation can be accessed by running ?function_name in the R console, e.g., ?graph_sem.

Furthermore, there are three main vignettes, describing the three main tracks of tidySEM functions:

1. A vignette about generating syntax and estimating models
2. A vignette about tabulating results
3. A vignette about making graphs
   • An additional vignette describes the graphing conventions for structural equation models.

Citing tidySEM

You can cite the R-package with the following citation:

Van Lissa, C. J., (2019). tidySEM: Tidy structural equation modeling. R package version 0.2.1. https://github.com/cjvanlissa/tidySEM/

Contributing and Contact Information

If you have ideas, please get involved. You can contribute by opening an issue on ‘GitHub’, or sending a pull request with proposed features (see further instructions below).

• File a ‘GitHub’ issue here
• Make a pull request here

By participating in this project, you agree to abide by the Contributor Covenant.

Pull requests

• Please always contribute via pull request instead of committing to master, so I can review the contribution.
  • You can either fork the repository to your own account and then submit a pull request, or make minor changes directly on this repository, and choose to commit them to a different branch and send a pull request when you save those changes
• If you fix an issue, in your Commit message, please write “closes #issuenumber” so we can trace which commits fixed which issues
• Please add a line to NEWS.md for each bug fix or feature contribution
• Please increment the minor version number in DESCRIPTION, e.g.: 0.2.3.1 -> 0.2.3.2