Customer Reviews

Structural Equation Modeling: Concepts, Issues, and Applications

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This book was my saving grace in writing my dissertation. The book provides an excellent review of SEM's concepts, issues, and applications in both EQS and Lisrel, in a manner which is understandable to a budding researcher.

Comprehensive coverage of SEM, highly technical and heavy with references. Better for advanced students of SEM rather than novices.

A fine work on structural equation modeling (SEM). This is a technique that allows one to develop path models coupled with confirmatory factor analysis (in its full and most useful form) to predict phenomena. This book has some nice essays in it, and I have used this as one tool by which to master SEM.

Now, there are a number of software packages that allow one to use this technique. My personal choice? AMOS (Analysis of Moment Structures for those who care!). I have analyzed a number of data sets with this program, and it provides satisfactory analysis.

Some advantages of SEM? There are a variety of "measures of fit," showing how well one's model describes the data. This is a substantial advantage over other prediction techniques, like regression, which have some fit statistics--but nothing like SEM.

Among the most useful chapters in this collection of essay: Hoyle's Introduction to SEM; Chou and Bentler on tests in SEM; Hu and Bentler's excellent essay on model fit and its evaluation (one of my most cited references when I use SEM in research); and so on.

There are several works that do a nice job outlining SEM. This volume was published in 1995, so it is a decade and a half old. Still, it is a solid work.