Author Description

LISREL 8 offers an impressive array of facilities for data analysis including indirect and total effects and their standard errors; direct specification of mean parameters; a Ridge Option for handling covariance and correlation matrices that are not positive-definitive; and modification indices for all iterative estimation methods. Advancements of special interest include: * the new command language -- SIMPLIS -- that is easy to use and minimizes the possibility of mistakes in the problem set up; * high quality path diagrams that can be produced on the screen and printed; * many new measures that judge the fit of the model; * linear and nonlinear constraints that may be imposed on any set of model parameters; * general covariance structures that allow formulation of models that cannot be specified as LISREL models; and * interval restrictions that may be imposed on any single parameter. Advanced users will gain new insights into the use of asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) analysis, as well as power calculations for tests of model augmentation, automatic model modification, and other program features. Included with LISREL 8 is PRELIS 2, a preprocessor for LISREL which greatly improves and accelerates analysis of binary, categorical, ordinal, censored, continuous, and/or incomplete data. New features of PRELIS 2 include: * missing values on a variable that may be inputed by matching on other variables; * new variables that may be created as functions of other variables; * tests of univariate and multivariate normality that are obtained for all continuous variables; * bootstrap estimates that may be obtained of the covariance matrix of correlations and other associations measures for which no asymptotic theory is available; * univariate and multivariate multinomial probit models that may be estimated for any set of jointly dependent ordinal variables and a