Blunch provides a textbook for an introductory course in structural equation modelling for the social and behavioral sciences at an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level for students who have completed an introductory course in statistics up to and including multiple regression; however, he also reviews the prerequisite statistics in an appendix. SPSS is a statistics program used at most universities and should be well known to the students, and AMOS is sold as an add-on to it for classroom use. He begins by explaining how to explore data, discussing classical test theory and exploratory factor analysis. Then he delves into modelling reality itself, examining models with only manifest variables, the general causal model, ad incomplete and non-normal data. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
New software (Lisrel and AMOS) has made the techniques of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) increasingly available to students and researchers, while the recent adoption of AMOS as part of the SPSS suite has improved access still further.
As an alternative to existing books on the subject, which are customarily very long, very high-level and very mathematical, not to mention expensive, Niels Blunch's introduction has been designed for advanced undergraduates and Masters students who are new to SEM and still relatively new to statistics.
Illustrated with screenshots, cases and exercises and accompanied by a companion website containing datasets that can be easily uploaded onto SPSS and AMOS, this handy introduction keeps maths to a minimum and contains an appendix covering basic forms of statistical analysis.
