About MATILDA

MATILDA stands for Measurement, Analysis & Theory for Intensive Longitudinal Data. We provide peer-reviewed educational articles for researchers that want to use intensive longitudinal data to study psychological processes.

MATILDA articles highlight key considerations when designing an ILD study. We aim to facilitate a clear, integrated understanding of these considerations and the overall study process, supporting researchers in aligning their goals, theory, measurements, and analyses.

Below, we present MATILDA’s approach to facilitating understanding, reflected in its guiding design principles. At the bottom of this page you find our credit statement indicating how MATILDA was started and who contributed to this. You can find the full list of current MATILDA’s editors, authors and reviewers on our Who We Are page.

Our Approach to Facilitating Understanding

MATILDA’s content is designed to facilitate understanding, guided by five principles: it is open, accessible, educational, interconnected, and theory-focused.

Open

MATILDA has been designed with open science principles in mind. Hence MATILDA content, including their peer reviews, are freely accessible to anyone interested.

You can read more about our submission and review process here.

Accessible

MATILDA aims to provide accessible content, even on relatively technical topics such as statistical models. Articles are written such that they should be understandable for a broad audience of (psychological) researchers with varying levels of experience in ILD research.

We vet this by - next to having each article reviewed for accuracy - explicitly asking at least one reviewer to evaluate the readability of each article.

Specifically we aim for content to be understandable for master students in psychology who are familiar with basic psychological study designs and have a solid grasp of multiple linear regression.

Educational

MATILDA content is designed in line with the saying “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”.

How to best set up the measurements, design and analyses of a study is highly dependent on the goals of the researchers, the topic of study, and practical considerations (such as budget). As a result, studies typically have to some extent unique considerations, problems, and solutions; and “gold standards”, rules of thumb, and one-size-fits-all solutions are rarely truly effective.

Rather, MATILDA aims to empower researchers with knowledge and understanding, to help them decide how to optimally design their studies.

Interconnected

The theoretical background, measurements, procedures and analyses of a study are inherently intertwined: Changing one aspect of a study typically impacts all the others.

Hence we have designed MATILDA as a website with highly interconnected content, with articles often linking to one another.

Theory-focused

MATILDA content focuses on theoretical considerations and implications, rather than on practical concerns for designing studies.

MATILDA emphasizes thinking about the behavior of the psychological process of interest, and about how this should impact the collection and analysis of ILD, such that one can answer ones research question.

Practicalities, such as budget, available software and their options, etc., are very important for designing studies, but not the focus of MATILDA.

Credit Statement

MATILDA forms a concrete realization of the methodological framework proposed in the ERC grant that funded the start of this project (ERC-2019-COG-865468 from the European Research Council awarded to Ellen Hamaker). It was initiated and conceptualized by Noémi Schuurman, Sophie Berkhout, and Pia Andresen, and was expanded and refined by the Dynamic Modeling Lab, in particular by Pia Andresen, Sophie Berkhout, Ellen Hamaker, Ria Hoekstra and Noémi Schuurman, with help from Dan Berry, Manuel Haqiqatkhah, IJsbrand Leertouwer, Jeroen Mulder, Nina van Gerwen, Pepijn Vink, Ward Eiling, and Martijn van Dam.

We are grateful for the insight and expertise of the following individuals, who contributed to shaping MATILDA during an expert meeting hosted by the Dynamic Modeling Lab: Amanda Bernal, Denny Borsboom, Laura Bringmann, Leonie Cloos, Egon Dejonckheere, Gudrun Eisele, Kyra Evers, Eiko Fried, Olivia Kirtley, Peter Kuppens, Matthias Mehl, Merijn Mestdagh, Marie Stadel, and Rayyan Toutounji.