statistical references

[ericcastet]

Hello Dominique,
I've been using mixed-effects models since 2010 in my scientific publications and I find your package very promising to promote these models in the psycho/neuroscience community (I've been trying myself to promote them among my colleagues and students). My concern is that the verbal explanations you give for instance with "print (results)" as shown in
https://neuropsychology.github.io/psycho.R//2018/05/01/repeated_measure_anovas.html
might be used by "quick" scientists without them trying to really understand what they're saying (mixed effects models are great but they can easily be misused).
My suggestion, in order to be more didactic, would be to add (include) accurate references to acknowledged statistical textbooks or papers.
For instance, still using your "repeated_measure_anovas.html" blog: when you say in the "effect of emotion" section: "the overall model predicting .... successfully converged and explained 56.73% of the variance of the endogen (the conditional R2)", it would be nice if you stated explicitely, along with these lines or at least somewhere in the blog, how you connect this sentence to a reference with didactic explanations: where does the number come from, what is a conditional R2, and so on.
Along the same lines, it would be nice if you could explain (with references) the links between the standard ANOVA model and mixed-effects models : my experience is that this issue is not trivial and there are not many clear explanations in the literature.
To conclude, I think that users of your package would feel more confident if they could relate the statements issued by your "print (results)" lines to statistical sources. I hope this message will be helpful. and don't hesitate to contact me if I haven't been clear enough. Eric Castet.

[DominiqueMakowski]

@ericcastet thanks for your comment! Altough the blog post you mention was meant to be a quick "hands on" introduction to mixed models for people googling "how to do rmANOVAs with R", I totally agree that the underlying rationale should be explained, somewhere, with more depth.

Do you have any ideas / suggestions as to how to explain it, or what references should we add?

We could indeed improve the documentation of the analyze function for mixed models, adding details and references. Would you be interested in participating to the developpment of such enhancement?