Jason Rights
Research Area
Education
B.S., Psychology and Mathematics; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011
M.S., Psychology (Quantitative Methods); Vanderbilt University, 2015
Ph.D., Psychology (Quantitative Methods); Vanderbilt University, 2019
About
Dr. Jason Rights is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His primary research focus is on addressing methodological complexities and developing statistical methods for multilevel/hierarchical data contexts (e.g., patients nested within clinicians, students nested within schools, or repeated measures nested within individuals).
Teaching
Research
My research is primarily focused on addressing methodological complexities and developing statistical methods for multilevel/hierarchical data contexts (e.g., patients nested within clinicians, students nested within schools, or repeated measures nested within individuals).
Specifically, I am currently pursuing several interrelated programs of research: (1) developing R-squared measures and methods for multilevel models; (2) addressing unappreciated consequences of conflating level-specific effects in analysis of multilevel data; (3) delineating relationships between multilevel models and other commonly used models, such as mixture models; and (4) advancing model selection and comparison methods for latent variable models. To aid researchers in applying my work, I develop software (primarily in R) that is openly available for public use.
Publications
Rights, J. D., & Sterba, S. K. (2020). New recommendations on the use of R-squared differences in multilevel model comparisons. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 55, 568-599.
Rights, J.D., Preacher, K.J., & Cole, D.A. (2020). The danger of conflating level-specific effects of control variables when primary interest lies in level-2 effects. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 73, 194-211.
Murphy, L.K., Rights, J.D., Ricciuto, A., Church, P.D., Kohut, S.A. (2020). Biopsychosocial predictors of presence and intensity of pain in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease. Frontiers in Pediatrics, 8, 559.
Cole, D.A., Lu, R., Rights, J.D., Mick, C.R., Lubarsky, S.R., Gabruk, M.E., Lovette, A.J., Zhang, Y., Ford, M.A., Nick, E.A. (2020). Emotional and cognitive reactivity: Validating a multilevel modeling approach to daily diary data. Psychological Assessment, 32, 431-441.
Cole, D.A., Lu, R., Rights, J.D., Braehmer, S.F., Lubarsky, S.R., Mick, C.R., Zhang, Y., Ford, M.A., Lovette, A.J., Gabruk, M.E., Nick, E.A. (2020). Dynamic measures of emotional and cognitive reactivity in college students. Psychological Assessment, 30, 109-122.
Rights, J.D., & Cole, D.A. (2018). Effect size measures for multilevel models in clinical child and adolescent research: New R-squared methods and recommendations. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 47, 863-873.
Fales, J.L., Murphy, L.K., Rights, J.D., & Palermo, T.M. (2020). Daily peer victimization experiences of adolescents with and without chronic pain: Associations with mood, sleep, pain, and activity limitations. Journal of Pain, 21, 97-107.
Cole, D.A., Zelkowitz, R.L., Nick, E.A., Lubarsky, S.R., & Rights, J.D. (2019). Simultaneously examining negative appraisals, emotion reactivity, and cognitive reactivity in relation to depressive symptoms in children. Development and Psychopathology, 31, 1527-1540.
Rights, J.D., & Sterba, S.K. (2019). Quantifying explained variance in multilevel models: An integrative framework for defining R-squared measures. Psychological Methods, 24, 309-338.
Rights, J.D., Sterba, S.K., Cho, S.-J., & Preacher, K.J. (2018). Addressing model uncertainty in item response theory person scores through model averaging. Behaviormetrika. 45, 495-503.
Murphy, L.K., Preacher, K.J., Rights, J.D., Rodriguez, E., Bemis, H., Desjardins, L., Prussien, K.V., Gerhardt, C.A., Vannatta, K., & Compas, B.E. (2018). Maternal communication in childhood cancer: Factor analysis and relation to maternal distress. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 43, 1114-1127.
Cole, D.A., Goodman, S, Garber, J., Cullum, K.A., Cho, S.-J., Rights, J.D., Felton, J.W., Jacquez, F.M., Korelitz, K.E., & Simon, H.F.M. (2018). Validating parent and child forms of the Parent Perception Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 30, 1065-1081.
Rights, J.D., & Sterba, S.K. (2018). A framework of R-squared measures for single-level and multilevel regression mixture models. Psychological Methods, 23, 434-457.
Cole, D.A., Martin, J.M., Jacquez, F.M., Tram, J.M., Zelkowitz, R., Nick, E.A., & Rights, J.D. (2017). Time-varying and time-invariant dimensions of depression in children and adolescents: Implications for cross-informant agreement. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126, 635-651.
Sterba, S.K., & Rights, J.D. (2017). Effects of parceling on model selection: Parcel-allocation variability in model ranking. Psychological Methods, 22, 47-68.
Rights, J.D., & Sterba, S.K. (2016). The relationship between multilevel models and nonparametric multilevel mixture models: Discrete approximation of intraclass correlation, random coefficient distributions, and residual heteroscedasticity. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 69, 316-343.
Sterba, S.K., & Rights, J.D. (2016). Accounting for parcel-allocation variability in practice: Combining sources of uncertainty and choosing the number of allocations. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 51, 296-313.