NEW hardcover

Basic Principles of Structural Equation Modeling: An Introduction to LISREL and EQS Springer Texts in Statistics [Hardcover] Mueller, Ralph O

During the last two decades, structural equation modeling SEM has emerged as a powerful multivariate data analysis tool in social science research settings, especially in the fields of sociology, psychology, and education Although its roots can be traced back to the first half of this century, when Spearman 1904 developed factor analysis and Wright 1934 introduced path analysis, it was not until the 1970s that the works by Karl Joreskog and his associates e g , Joreskog, 1977; Joreskog and Van Thillo, 1973 began to make general SEM techniques accessible to the social and behavioral science research communities Today, with the development and increasing avail ability of SEM computer programs, SEM has become a wellestablished and respected data analysis method, incorporating many of the traditional analysis techniques as special cases Stateoftheart SEM software packages such as LISREL Joreskog and Sorbom, 1993a,b and EQS Bentler, 1993; Bentler and Wu, 1993 handle a variety of ordinary least squares regression designs as well as complex structural equation models involving variables with arbitrary distributions Unfortunately, many students and researchers hesitate to use SEM methods, perhaps due to the somewhat complex underlying statistical repre sentation and theory In my opinion, social science students and researchers can benefit greatly from acquiring knowledge and skills in SEM since the methodsapplied appropriatelycan provide a bridge between the theo retical and empirical aspects of behavioral research