F.J. Oort is full professor of Methods and Statistics, director of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education, director of Research Priority Area Yield, and programme director of the Research Master Child Development and Education.

Methods and Statistics

The Methods and Statistics section teaches statistics, research methodology, test theory, test construction, and research skills at the bachelor level, and multivariate statistics, generalized linear modelling, structural equation modelling, multilevel data analysis and longitudinal data analysis at the master level.

Research focuses on statistical modelling, issues in measurement, and applications of statistics in psychological and educational research.

• Website of Methods and Statistics

Staff members

• Bonne Zijlstra

• Harry Garst

• Suzanne Jak

• Rudy Ligtvoet

• Annemarie Zand Scholten

• Andries van der Ark

• Mathilde Verdam

• Iris Smits

Research Institute of Child Development and Education

F.J. Oort is the director of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education. The Research Institute includes two research programmes. The Research Institute collaborates with the Graduate School of Child Development and Education in the training of PhD candidates and in the research master programme.

• Website of the Research Institute

Policy advisors

• Marielle de Reuver

• Annette van Maanen

Research Priority Area 'Yield' 

Yield conducts multidisciplinary research on the bioecology of human development, from infancy to young adulthood, with perspectives from Medicine, Psychology, Pedagogics, Education, Communication, Economics, and Psychometrics.

• Website RPA Yield

• Programme manager: Helle Larsen

Research Master Child Development and  Education

The two-year Research Master trains students for research into parenting, education, and child development. Research focuses on the nature, development and explanation of behaviour and attributes of babies, children, adolescents, and young adults. Below please find links to the full programme description of the research master and to the research master's website.

• Website of the Research Master

• Programme manager: Annette van Maanen

• Information brochure

Miscellaneous 1: Exploratory Factor Analysis

Example Mx scripts for conducting exploratory factor analysis as explained in: Oort, F.J. (2011). Likelihood-based confidence intervals in exploratory factor analysis. Structural Equation Modeling, 18, 383-396.

• EFA with oblique Crawford-Ferguson rotation as used in the paper

• EFA with oblique Crawford-Ferguson varimax rotation

• EFA with orthogonal Crawford-Ferguson varimax rotation

Miscellaneous 2: Full results of "Using Exploratory Factor Analysis to Determine the Dimensionality of Discrete Responses"

The paper appears in Structural Equation Modeling (in press).

• Tables with full results

Professional biography

F.J. Oort is full professor of Methods and Statistics, director of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education, director of Research Priority Area Yield, and programme director of the Research Master Child Development and Education. His research focuses on statistical modelling, issues in measurement, and applications of statistics in psychological and educational research.

F.J. Oort studied Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, graduated in 1989, and obtained his PhD in 1996. He is especially interested in non-standard applications of structural equation modelling (SEM). SEM includes the latent variable modelling of mean and covariance structures. His thesis was about the application of SEM to item response theory and test construction. At Leiden University he studied the application of SEM to three-mode data, such as multitrait multimethod data, and multivariate longitudinal data.

In 1999, he returned to the University of Amsterdam, to work as a statistician at the department of Medical Psychology of the Academic Medical Centre. In 2005 he was appointed as associate professor of Methods and Statistics at the Department of Education of the University of Amsterdam. Current interests include the integration of SEM with multi-level models,generalised linear models, exploratory factormodels, and item response models.

The focus of present research is "unbiased measurement" of psychological attributes in psychological and educational research. Many problems in psychometrics, such as item bias, test bias, response shift, culture bias, gender bias, response styles and tendencies, social desirability, etc., can be described as violations of "measurement invariance". This enables a single general approach to these various problems, using SEM to test measurement invariance hypotheses.

• No ancillary activities