Abstract

Wayne Velicer is remembered for a mind where mathematical concepts and calculations intrigued him, behavioral science beckoned him, and people fascinated him. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin on March 4, 1944, he was raised on a farm, although early influences extended far beyond that beginning. His Mathematics BS and Psychology minor at Wisconsin State University in Oshkosh, and his PhD in Quantitative Psychology from Purdue led him to a fruitful and far-reaching career. He was honored several times as a high-impact author, was a renowned scholar in quantitative and health psychology, and had more than 300 scholarly publications and 54,000+ citations of his work, advancing the arenas of quantitative methodology and behavioral health. In his methodological work, Velicer sought out ways to measure, synthesize, categorize, and assess people and constructs across behaviors and time, largely through principal components analysis, time series, and cluster analysis. Further, he and several colleagues developed a method called Testing Theory-based Quantitative Predictions, successfully applied to predicting outcomes and effect sizes in smoking cessation, diet behavior, and sun protection, with the potential for wider applications. With $60,000,000 in external funding, Velicer also helped engage a large cadre of students and other colleagues to study methodological models for a myriad of health behaviors in a widely applied Transtheoretical Model of Change. Unwittingly, he has engendered indelible memories and gratitude to all who crossed his path. Although Wayne Velicer left this world on October 15, 2017 after battling an aggressive cancer, he is still very present among us.

Highlights

  • The University of Rhode Island Faculty have made this article openly available

  • Principal Components Analysis A core interest, and perhaps his most salient methodological focus, concerned studying the merits of forming a few concentrated combinations of information from a larger number of variables in order to understand the nature of a construct (e.g., Velicer, Eaton, & Fava, 2000)

  • A highly cited paper in this forum was the development of a reliable procedure for determining the number of components to retain from assessing the minimum average partial (MAP) correlations among items (Velicer, 1976)

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Summary

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Please let us know how Open Access to this research benefits you. This is not the version of record but is a preprint for Harlow, L. M., Cumming, G., Fava, J., Goodwin, M.

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