ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, there has been a surge in the use of structural equation models (SEM) in the business (especially marketing and information technology) and social science literatures. Such models are less common in public administration though there is a noticeable growth in the last few years as well. Like all new techniques to a field, there is considerable divergence in the quality of their application as researchers discover uses and limitations. The advent of graphical interfaces for common programs for SEM estimation, like LISREL, has significantly lessened the technical barriers but at the expense of manuscript quality. This chapter is a practical introduction to the use of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) or models. The purpose is to familiarize the beginner, and
statistical issues. The reader is presumed to be familiar with common factor and principal component analyses.
