ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the basic multigroup latent class (LC) model, and discusses two important extensions of the basic model, an extension for dealing with ordinal indicators and for modeling the latent variables as ordinal variables. It analyses measurement invariance using multigroup LC models, discussing the general procedure as well as methods for parameter estimation and evaluation of model fit. The multigroup extension of the standard LC model has been developed for the analysis of latent structures of observed categorical variables across two or more groups. The chapter presents three parameterizations of the multigroup LC models: probabilistic, log-linear, and logistic parameterizations. Multigroup LC models assume the presence of three types of categorical variables: observed variables; an unobserved variable that accounts for the relationships between the observed variables. LC models are usually estimated by means of maximum-likelihood under the assumption of a multinomial distribution for the indicator variables in the model.
