Structural equation modeling

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Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a diverse set of methods used by scientists for both observational and experimental research. SEM is used mostly in the social and behavioral science fields, but it is also used in econometrics (where it's known as structural estimation), epidemiology, business, and other fields. By a standard definition, SEM is "a class of methodologies that seeks to represent hypotheses about the means, variances, and covariances of observed data in terms of a smaller number of 'structural' parameters defined by a hypothesized underlying conceptual or theoretical model". SEM involves a model representing how various aspects of some phenomenon are thought to causally connect to one another. Structural equation models often contain postulated causal connections among some latent variables (variables thought to exist but which can't be directly observed). Additional causal connections link those latent variables to observed variables whose values appear in a data set...

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