ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a nontechnical introduction to the use of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for cross-national comparisons that include mean structures. It presents an analysis of European survey data on political and social trust. In CFA, or structural equation modeling (SEM) more generally, the interest lies in accounting for the observed pattern of covariances between manifest variables with reference to one or more latent variables. Both social and political trust tend to be correlated at the individual and the aggregate country levels. Social or interpersonal trust relates to beliefs held by individuals in a given society about the moral orientation and incentive structure of a diffuse, unknown "other". The chapter demonstrates the techniques with an analysis of social and political trust in Europe in three waves of the European Social Survey (ESS). The ESS was designed to study the changes in institutions and attitudes, beliefs, and behavior patterns in Europe.
