Theory:

1. Like Phlogiston, fairies and witches, latent variables need to be abandoned
2. Psychological disorders are a 'network' of causally interacting symptoms (Borsboom, 2017)

Practice:

1. Estimate statistical models such as the Gaussian graphical model on cross-sectional data
2. Visualize the network
3. Compute so-called centrality measures for each node
4. Interpret high scoring nodes as important, suggest them as intervention targets

Examples:

• Stochl et al. (2018) studied well-being and find that 3 items are consistently the most central items
• McNally et al. (2015) studied earthquake victims suffering PTSD (use the word causal 59 times)