Modeling with Structural Equations

Welcome! The purpose of this website is to provide information for those interested in analyzing data using the methodology known as Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Both background information and tutorials are provided.

What's New? This site has historically had a number of Amos tutorials. However, I am now developing generic SEM tutorials (found under the Tutorials tab) and then providing code for those tutorials for Amos, Mplus, and winbugs (Bayesian) users.

A Bit About Organization: Since this is meant to be a "how to" website, I present tutorials and then have available the code for several different analysis platforms. At present, I provide code for three platforms. To some degree, this represents three different kinds of SEM users. 

1- Amos (easy to use GUI-based software designed for teaching SEM). This is best suited for scientists who want to get up and running with SEM quickly.

2- Mplus (code-based, advanced applications software for SEM). This is best suited for those who want to run more complex models and don't mind paying a greater price in terms of the time it takes to learn and implement analyses.

3- Bayesian SEM (winBUGS and R2BUGS programming for customized model specification using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods). The Bayesian approach can provide extreme versatility in model specification. However, the business of model evaluation is not automated in the Bayesian approach, which means Bayesian SEM requires much more time to use properly.

About the site - The information on this site may be useful for folks from all scientific disciplines. That said, my background is in the natural sciences and the great majority of information online about SEM is from the social and economic sciences, so my secondary purpose is to provide illustrations that support natural science applications.

Please provide feedback, questions, comments, and suggestions to jim_grace@cox.net.