ABSTRACT
Latent variable modeling (LVM) has been in existence for over 100 years. Its first appearance in Spearman's 1904 paper, “General Intelligence,” Objectively Determined and Measured, was in the form of factor analysis. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Spearman's paper, a conference was organized and an edited volume of chapters was subsequently published (Cudeck & MacCallum, 2007) examining historical developments and modern directions and issues in the field of factor analysis. In one sense, the purpose of the present volume is to expand the scope of that endeavor beyond factor analysis to the broader field of LVM. Despite the century of evolution that saw the rudimentary concepts of factor analysis eventually yield a wide array of latent variable models, when we consider the core of modern LVM methods we see the unmistakable traces of Spearman's work.
