[R] Is SEM package of R suitable for sem analysis

[Wincent]

I don't know the situation of psychology. In sociology, SEM is
regarded is advanced statistical technique, but I am not quite sure if
it is  golden model. Actually, SEM is not so common in journal papers.
It is not about R. Sorry for being off-topic.

Best

2009/12/28 Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name>:
> Well, I guess it will be extremely difficult to persuade your teacher
> to use the sem package in R. AFAIK, AMOS and LISREL have become the
> golden standard for SEM in China, and SEM has become a golden model
> for analysis in social science and psychology. I have been a cynic to
> SEM for a long time, because I strongly believe this model has been
> completely abused, and perhaps the "easy-to-use" AMOS has been helping
> people abuse SEM. A common phenomenon I see is, people do not care
> about the model at all - all they care about is whether AMOS can
> successfully compute the coefficients; if AMOS failed, they will try
> to (randomly) set constraints to the model, i.e. add/remove this
> arrow, drag some variables into/out of the model, set this
> coefficient/variance to 1.
>
> Anyway, I encourage you to ask your teacher why AMOS is "more
> suitable". I have a couple of very ridiculous stories about the SEM
> software, in which I can only feel the blind faith in software.
> Sigh...
>
> The good thing is, R is open source, so is the sem package. You can
> see everything in it, and you can extend it as you wish (in case your
> teacher think it is less suitable).
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
> Phone: 515-294-6609 Web: http://yihui.name
> Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
> 3211 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Reeyarn_李智洋_10928113 <reeyarn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Bruno and Joe,
>>
>> Thanks for advising!
>>
>>
>> Reeyarn
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Bruno Falissard <falissard_b at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>
>>> A few years ago it could have been true, but now the package has improved
>>> (especially with the bootstrap procedure).
>>> At the moment there is no argument to recommend AMOS.
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Joe King <jp at joepking.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I am going to take SEM this next quarter in my doctoral program. My
>>> suggestion is to use the program your professor suggests and try to
>>> re-create your models in R using the SEM package.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
Wincent Ronggui HUANG
Doctoral Candidate
Dept of Public and Social Administration
City University of Hong Kong
http://asrr.r-forge.r-project.org/rghuang.html