Estimating Psychological Networks and their Stability: a Tutorial Paper

Over the course of the last years, network research has gained increasing popularity in psychological sciences. Especially in clinical psychology and personality research, such psychological networks have been used to complement more traditional latent variable models. While prior publications have tackled the two topics of network psychometrics (how to estimate networks) and network inference (how to interpret networks), the topic of network stability still provides a major challenge: it is unclear how susceptible network structures and graph theoretical measures derived from network models are to sampling error and choices made in the estimation method, greatly limiting the certainty of substantive interpretation. In this tutorial paper, we aim to address these challenges. First, we introduce the current state-of-the-art of network psychometrics and network inference in psychology to allow readers to use this tutorial as a stand-alone to estimate and interpret psychopathological networks in R. Second, we describe how bootstrap routines can be used to assess the stability of network parameters. To facilitate this process, we developed the freely available R-package bootnet. We apply bootnet, accompanied by R syntax, to a dataset of 359 women with posttraumatic stress disorder available online. We show how to estimate confidence intervals around edge weights, and how to examine stability of centrality indices by subsampling nodes and persons. This tutorial is aimed at researchers with all levels of statistical experience, and can also be used by beginners.