Sonya K. Sterba

Contact Information

L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory
Department of Psychology CB# 3270
Davie Hall Rm. 342-A
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270

Phone: (919) 619-4822
Fax: (919) 962-2537
e-mail:

Research Interests

I am a member of Dr. Daniel Bauer's laboratory in the Quantitative Psychology program at UNC and also am involved in psychiatric epidemiological work at the Center for Developmental Epidemiology at Duke University.

My research focuses on the evaluation, adaptation, and application of quantitative methods to address questions relevant to child clinical psychology. Because the study of co-occurring psychiatric disorders (i.e., comorbidities) has played a central role in refining the nosology of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders, my present work addresses methodological issues in comorbidity research. For example, my interests include: adaptation of longitudinal latent variable models (e.g., structural equation mixture modeling) to capture successive comorbidity from one disorder to another across childhood; measurement and modeling of rare clinical symptoms; consequences of non-random and/or purposive selection of (a) participants and (b) symptoms measured.

Please feel free to with any questions about the Quantitative Psychology program at UNC or graduate student life in Chapel Hill.