Biography

Dr. Michael J. Rovine is a Senior Fellow in Quantitative Methods at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He is a developmental methodologist and quantitative psychologist. He is also a member of the Quantitative Development Group at The Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Rovine is the former director of Penn State’s Methodology Consulting Center. He has been affiliated with Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute and was involved in many of their interdisciplinary research initiatives.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Rovine’s research is in areas related to statistical modeling. Using a structural equations modeling (SEM) approach, he looks at ways to estimate a number of different multilevel models as SEM. One model is a multilevel autoregressive model that could have important implications for those collecting intensive time series or ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data. He has also been involved in the development of the SEM version of the nonstationary autoregressive moving average model (NARMA), which can be used to describe essentially any latent variable model. Dr. Rovine is also interested in the relationship between different models based on the general linear mixed model, including a comparison of repeated measures ANOVA and multilevel growth curve modeling.

Dr. Rovine’s main focus is on idiographic approaches to the description of developmental phenomena. He recently completed a study funded by the National Science Foundation to develop and apply time series models to developmental data. Working with developmental psychologists and engineers on a number of different models including multilevel ARMA, state space, and optimal control models, Dr. Rovine is continuing this work with a special emphasis on hidden Markov modeling which he has used to model mother-infant interactions. He is currently involved in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to look at the development of self-regulation in infants. Along with a colleague at Penn State, Dr. Rovine is looking at the possibility of modeling and eventually controlling the incidence of symptoms and attacks in asthma sufferers and blood glucose level in diabetes patients. 

He is also interested in the history of statistics, particularly the contributions of the philosopher C. S. Peirce to the development of statistical methodology­. Dr. Rovine first encountered Peirce’s work while developing variations of the correlation coefficient that could be used to describe effect sizes in uncontrolled studies. Looking for antecedents, he discovered a similar coefficient presented by Peirce in 1884 along with an interesting history of correlation and regression that predated the better known work of Pearson and Galton.

Journal Editorial Boards

The Gerontologist
Editorial Board