ABSTRACT
The literature on latent class/profile analysis (LCA) dates back to the seminal works of Lazarsfeld and Henry (1968) and Goodman (1974); it reflects an extraordinarily flexible technique that has been utilized in a variety of fields. In medicine, LCA has been used extensively for a variety of purposes including: estimating the quality of procedures used for diagnosing specific diseases when a gold standard is not available (e.g., Albert, McShane, Shih, & the U.S. National Cancer Institute Bladder Tumor Market Network 2001; Formann & Kohlmann, 1996), identifying disease subtypes (e.g. Huh et al., 2011), and analyzing and interpreting diagnostic agreement (e.g., Uebersax & Grove, 1990). Outside of medicine, LCA has been applied for such disparate purposes as modeling jury verdicts (e.g., Gelfand, & Solomon, 1974), investigating social capital (Owen & Videras, 2009), and research on market segmentation (Wedel & Kamakura, 2001). This technique is not as popular in the fields of education and psychology, but there are applications to academic cheating (Dayton & Scheers, 1997), psychiatry (e.g., Kendler, Karkowski, & Walsh, 1998), and the validation of cognitive theory (Jansen & van der Maas, 1997), to name a few.
