Beginning with SEM in lavaan

While reordering some old papers I rediscovered a paper by Dawn Iacobucci introducing structural equation modeling: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SEM (Structural Equations Modeling) But Were Afraid to Ask. I liked Iacobucci’s introduction to SEM because it was eloquently written, clear and accessible. Moreover, Iacobucci accompanied the paper with a data-set and step-by-step explanation of the syntax to analyze it. This allowed the reproduction of her analysis to all the adventurous readers willing to start with structural equation modeling. Iacobucci used LISREL for the data-analysis and, at the time, I had no access to LISREL. Now, however, with lavaan available, when I encountered the paper again I saw an opportunity to make her approach reproducible by a wider audience since lavaan is available to anyone and its syntax is very intuitive. In this post I translate Iacobucci’s LISREL syntax to lavaan.

Plotting multiple mediation

This posts on multiple mediation on lavaan supplements the two previous ones (1 – introducing multiple mediator analysis with lavaan and 2 – showing an example analysis) by describing how to process lavaan’s output graphically. I discovered the handy package semPlot and I am very positive about it. I will make the example as reproducible as possible, so that each step can be repeated. Also, I am going to try to provide more explanation about the R commands I used because a friend pointed out that the description of the steps was sometimes a bit dry and abstract.