The programme group Research Methods and Statistics has a broad orientation on research. It offers support to researchers from a variety of research projects within Education and Child Studies.

This support ranges from one-time consultation through close collaboration, within the institute as well as in long-term associations with other universities, like Erasmus University (Rotterdam), and the University of Cambridge. A large diversity of methods is applied, such as (repeated measures) ANOVA, multiple regression, multilevel analysis, and meta-analysis.

There is also expertise in addressing situations where the available data do not meet the standard statistical assumptions, for instance, when there is no (multivariate) normality, or when the data set contains categorical variables. More specific areas of expertise are:

• Multivariate analysis techniques (and applications) for prediction
• Multivariate analysis techniques (and applications) for classification
• Machine Learning
• Missing data
• Gene x Environment interactions (GxE)
• Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS)
• SNP genotyping
• Multivariate categorical data analysis (specifically categorical principal components analysis and regression)
• Inference with categorical data (using the bootstrap and permution tests)
• Simulation designs
• Smoothing methods