Latent variable modelling

In the analysis of a cross-national survey such as the European Social Survey (ESS), many research questions naturally involve comparisons between countries. In latent variable modelling, these questions can be formulated as multigroup models where the country of a respondent is treated as an explanatory variable for the latent variables. This allows us to examine differences between countries in the distributions of the latent constructs. Multigroup models can also be used to assess cross-national measurement equivalence, that is whether the measurement of the latent variables by the observed items is comparable across the countries. Such multigroup models are one of the topics of this module.