Simulation studies are a powerful tool within the field of network psychometrics, providing insight into sample size determination and best practices for achieving accurate results. Regrettably, the advantages simulation studies provide have thus far been predominately harnessed by psychological researchers with a statistical or methodological background. While user-friendly methods for simulating psychological networks have been developed, there remains a lack of comprehensive guidelines for their effective utilization. In response, this tutorial paper serves as a guide on how to set up simulation studies for three widely used network modeling techniques: the Ising model, the Gaussian Graphical Model (GGM), and the Graphical Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model. We explain the rationale behind simulation studies and present a step-by-step roadmap to initiate one's own simulation studies. This roadmap covers all essential aspects using a practical example to guide the reader. In addition, we provide an overview of open-source software packages available for simulating network models in the statistical programming environment R, and demonstrate their practical application. In doing so, we aim to enable more researchers to explore and resolve statistical questions within network psychometrics.
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