New approaches to missing data in psychological research: introduction to the special section.

Traditional approaches to missing data (e.g., listwise deletion) can lead to less than optimal results in terms of bias, statistical power, or both. This article introduces the 3 articles in the special section of Psychological Methods, which consider multiple imputation and maximum-likelihood methods, new approaches to missing data that can often yield improved results. Computer software is now available to implement these new methods.