Creating Misspecified Models in Moment Structure Analysis

Keke Lai ()
Additional contact information
Keke Lai: University of California

Psychometrika, 2019, vol. 84, issue 3, No 7, 801 pages

Abstract: Abstract To understand how SEM methods perform in practice where models always have misfit, simulation studies often involve incorrect models. To create a wrong model, traditionally one specifies a perfect model first and then removes some paths. This approach becomes difficult or even impossible to implement in moment structure analysis and fails to control the amounts of misfit separately and precisely for the mean and covariance parts. Most importantly, this approach assumes a perfect model exists and wrong models can eventually be made perfect, whereas in practice models are all implausible if taken literally and at best provide approximations of the real world. To improve the traditional approach, we propose a more realistic and flexible way to create model misfit for multiple group moment structure analysis. Given (a) the model $$\varvec{{{\upmu }}} (\cdot ) $$μ(·) and $$\varvec{{\Sigma }} (\cdot ) $$Σ(·), (b) population model parameters $$\varvec{{{\uptheta }}} _0$$θ0, and (c) $$F_1$$F1 and $$F_2$$F2 specified by the researcher, our method creates $$\varvec{{{\upmu }}} ^*$$μ∗ and $$\varvec{{\Sigma }} ^*$$Σ∗ to simultaneously satisfy (a) $$\varvec{{{\uptheta }}} _0 = \arg \min F[\varvec{{{\upmu }}} ^*, \varvec{{\Sigma }} ^*; \varvec{{{\upmu }}} (\cdot ), \varvec{{\Sigma }} (\cdot )]$$θ0=argminF[μ∗,Σ∗;μ(·),Σ(·)], (b) the mean structure’s misfit equals $$F_1$$F1, and (c) the covariance structure’s misfit equals $$F_2$$F2.

Keywords: Monte Carlo experiments; model misspecification; moment structure analysis; multiple group analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11336-018-09655-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:psycho:v:84:y:2019:i:3:d:10.1007_s11336-018-09655-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... gy/journal/11336/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11336-018-09655-0

Access Statistics for this article

Psychometrika is currently edited by Irini Moustaki

More articles in Psychometrika from Springer, The Psychometric Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().