Questions about tidyLPA

[QI ZHANG]

Dear tyidyLPA group,

I am a PhD student at UW-Madison in Education Psychology department, and I want to say thank you so much for putting together the tidyLPA package, which is really helpful for my study. I really appreciate it!

I just have a few questions about tidyLPA. First, I noticed that when I compared the fit of several estimated models, the fit indices could change if I run the syntax again and again, which means sometimes maybe 2-class model would be the best model, but sometimes 3-class would be the best. Similar to this, when I was estimating the profiles, I also could get different profiles if I run the syntax again. For example, I could get different profile plots for the same 3-class solution. I am wondering if there is any method that I can get more stable results, because if the results keep changing, I found it difficult to explain the meaning of the profiles.

Looking forward to your suggestions. Thank you in advance for your help!

Best,

Qi

Department of Educational Psychology

University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA