Erik J. Reinbergs, PhD (Page 1)

Lab year in review: 2025-2026

We're into July, which means two full years at USU have passed. USU continues to be a great place for me. Good people at all levels: Admin, faculty, students. Lots of beautiful mountain views and, this year, a very mild winter. And our program got full APA accreditation

work flow

What I use

✍️Last updated 2026-07-12 I'm always curious about how academics actually accomplish their work. Andrew Heiss has a post here about the tools they use, which inspired me to write up something similar below. * Writing: Microsoft Word with the Zotero plugin * Presenting: Microsoft PowerPoint * Email/Calendar: Outlook

stata

Stata .do file template

✍️Last updated 2026-07-12 Having a template for new .do files is an easy time saver. This template assumes you're running everything in one file, but this can be easily modified if you break your workflow into multiple do files such as 01_cleaning.do and 02_

rstats

Faceted histograms for a set of items, by group

When doing psychometric work, it's nice to be able to visualize the histograms of each item in one plot. When there is a key group of interest (e.g., gender, treatment assignment, diagnosis), it's useful to be able to visualize the histograms by group for each

lab updates

Lab year in review: 2024-2025

I just wrapped up my academic first year at Utah State University. It has been a great move. Great colleagues, great town, great views, great students. The political situation in Utah though is... not ideal. The college of education (where the Department of Psychology is that I'm located

school mental health

What to make of Utah's HB 281?

💬Update: This blog post reflects views on the bill's early language at the time it was written. The bill that ultimately passed and became law has aspects that are different from the early versions, and thus the below is not totally relevant to the current law. (Maybe I&

stata

Offsetting points in Stata marginsplot graphs

👀Edit: Turns out there is a user-written package that greatly simplifies this process. Check out the mplotoffset package: ssc install mplotoffset. Just replace your typical marginsplot command with mplotoffset instead. Within R, the marginaleffects package makes calculating predicted probabilities easy from all sorts of different models. It also makes

stata

Stata vs. R: Ordered logistic regression

I recently experienced a great example of trying to do something relatively basic in R that I could not figure out (okay—that happens all the time for me, but let's pretend). In Stata, running an ordered logistic regression with cluster robust standard errors is straight-forward.

stata

Sensitivity analysis

Just finished taking a really useful ICPSR summer workshop on sensitivity analysis with Kenneth Frank. Thought I'd share a few learnings. Dr. Frank's team has built an app for calculating the robustness of inference to replacement statistic (RIR; for continuous and dichotomous outcomes) and the impact

stata

Why Stata in 2024?

I was lucky enough to be exposed to both R and Stata in grad school. However, I definitely understood Stata before I understood R—so my mind still tends to default to Stata logic. Now I try to keep reasonably up to date on both and routinely use both. Every

lab updates

Lab year in review: 2023-2024

We had several lab milestones this year. Dr. Reinbergs presented on non-fatal firearm injuries at the IASR/AFSP International Summit on Suicide Research in Barcelona. A preprint of the manuscript of this work is available here. Carmen Ibarra published the lab's first article, an examination of whether

suicide prevention

Josh's bench UHCL dedication speech

This semester, UHCL became home to a new installation from the Josh's Bench organization. The organization installs yellow benches with crisis line numbers in an effort to decrease mental health stigma and prevent suicides. We place our benches in public parks and schools because we want to show

lab updates

Lab year in review: 2022-2023

This was a busy year for the Reinbergs Lab. Congratulations to both Mary Beth and Carmen who defended their master's theses! The lab had one publication accepted on measuring attitudes related to suicide prevention and submitted another manuscript on crisis/suicide training in school psychology. Dr. Reinbergs gave

suicide prevention

Firearm lethal means counseling in schools

[This is a re-post of a blog post I wrote for the Network of Early Career Researchers in Suicide and Self-harm (netECR)] Firearms are ubiquitous in the United States. However, few people here are aware that most gun deaths in the US are suicides. Young people are not

academia

Advice for new grad students

During undergrad, I was friends with two grad students getting their PhDs in a top English program. During my junior and senior year, I started going to panels and talks about going to grad school...

research

Schools are not prepared for flooding caused by the climate crisis

This week, Hurricane Ida wrought havoc and flooding from New Orleans to New York City. Expert research has shown that the climate crisis is increasing the frequency and severity of climate disasters. It is no secret that huge amounts of infrastructure are increasingly vulnerable to these disasters. As communities make

suicide prevention

The country’s largest suicide prevention organization is in crisis

Today, members are resigning en mass from the American Association of Suicidology to protest the mishandling of the organization by a…

school psych

Okay Google: Do school psychologists…?

Inspired by this post by Sean Erreger LCSW, I thought I’d tackle answering some common questions about school psychology suggested by…

school psych

Students need support. School psychologists are here to help.

School psychology is a broad field. Its researchers and practitioners have a wide range of training and expertise. This can make it hard to…

suicide prevention

Highlighting measurement challenges in suicide research

[This is a re-post of a blog post I wrote for the Network of Early Career Researchers in Suicide and Self-harm (netECR)] Measuring complex constructs related to suicide (i.e., suicidal ideation, planning, behaviors, intent, attempts, etc.) is extremely challenging. Many of these terms lack agreed upon definitions