Latent variable models are used in many areas of the social and
behavioural sciences, and the increasing availability of computer
packages for fitting such models is likely to increase their popularity.
This book attempts to introduce such models to applied statisticians and
research workers interested in exploring the structure of covari- ance
and correlation matrices in terms of a small number of unob- servable
constructs. The emphasis is on the practical application of the
procedures rather than on detailed discussion of their mathe- matical
and statistical properties. It is assumed that the reader is familiar
with the most commonly used statistical concepts and methods,
particularly regression, and also has a fair knowledge of matrix
algebra. My thanks are due to my colleagues Dr David Hand and Dr Graham
Dunn for helpful comments on the book, to Mrs Bertha Lakey for her
careful typing of a difficult manuscript and to Peter Cuttance for
assistance with the LlSREL package. In addition the text clearly owes a
great deal to the work on structural equation models published by Karl
Joreskog, Dag Sorbom, Peter Bentler, Michael Browne and others.