The mission of The Methodology Center is to advance public health by improving experimental design and data analysis in the social, behavioral, and health sciences.

Discovering Hidden Subgroups
Latent class analysis (LCA) allows researchers to detect the existence of subgroups within populations. Latent transition analysis (LTA) extends LCA to changes in group membership over time.
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Analyzing Rich, Complex Data Sets
Our intensive longitudinal data project provides tools for analyzing data with many observations, like data collected in smartphone studies. Our high-dimensional data project provides tools for variable selection and analysis of datasets with large numbers of variables, like genetics data.
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Designing and Building Health Interventions
The sequential, multiple assignment, randomized trial (SMART) project provides tools for building adaptive interventions so that treatments adapt to meet patients’ needs. The multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) is a framework for engineering interventions for purposes such as maximizing intervention potency within a specified cost limit or streamlining existing interventions for scale-up.
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Inferring Cause Without Randomization
Social, behavioral, and health researchers often face situations where randomization is not possible, practical, or ethical. Our causal inference project develops methods for inferring causality in non-randomized experiments or studies.
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The mission of The Methodology Center is to advance public health by improving experimental design and data analysis in the social, behavioral, and health sciences.

The Methodology Center will be active at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for Prevention Research (SPR). At this year's conference, The Science of Prevention: Building a Comprehensive National Strategy for Well-Being, we will be presenting symposiums, a special interest group, paper talks, and multiple posters. Also look for us at the ECPN symposiums. We hope to see you there!
May 6, 2013
Debashis Ghosh has been awarded the 2013 Mortimer Spiegelman Award. The award was created in 1970 by the Applied Public Health Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA) to honor a statistician, 40 years of age or younger, who has made outstanding contributions to health statistics, especially public health statistics. The award is presented annually at the APHA meeting, and it serves three purposes: to honor the outstanding achievements of both the recipient and Spiegelman, to encourage further public health involvement by the finest young statisticians, and to increase awareness of APHA and the Applied Public Health Statistics Section in the academic statistical community. The award will be presented at the 2013 APHA meeting in November.
April 16, 2013
The Methodology Center is pleased to release the latest version (1.3.0) of the SAS procedure PROC LCA for conducting latent class analysis (LCA). The software is available for download free of charge. The download also contains PROC LTA, the SAS Procedure for latent transition analysis. For an overview of PROC LCA and PROC LTA features, please visit the PROC LCA download page. New PROC LCA features include
The users’ guide has also been updated and revised. Please email mchelpdesk@psu.edu with any questions.
April 5, 2013
As part of the “Medicine: Mind the Gap” NIH Seminar Series, Methodology Center Director Linda Collins recently gave a talk at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington D.C. She discussed the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) and how it can be used to optimize interventions for smoking cessation, drug abuse prevention, treatment of obesity, promotion of physical activity, and other health-related behaviors. The seminar is part of the NIH lecture series that explores issues at the intersection of research, evidence and clinical practice—areas in which conventional wisdom may be contradicted by recent evidence. The goal of the series is to engage the NIH community in thought-provoking discussions about their role in helping to guide today’s research. This high-resolution video provides an excellent introduction to MOST.
Stream won’t work? Download the video
April 4, 2013
For April Fools' Day, we created an "special edition" of our eNews. For the lighter side of methodology, take a look.



