In my graduate class on path analysis, we do a lot of analysis on our own data. This year, I suggested that people consider analyzing simulated data based upon the statistics of their data. This way they’ll use a data set that looks like their data, but they aren’t doing a lot of model fitting on data they care about and what to use in real research. Thus, today I typed up a quick guide to simulating multivariate normal data in R for use in our class.

If you find typos, errors, etc., please let me know.