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An Application of Structural Equation Modeling to the Analysis of Ordered Categorical Factors Indicating Mother-Father-Child Interactions Impacting Cognitive Development of US Children at Age Five (304197)

Keywords: structural equation modeling, sem, ordinal data, categorical, mother-child interactions, cognitive development, receptive speech, language acquisition, parental involvement, father involvement, language development

This study was designed to reexamine the influence of parental involvement in a child's life on the child's speech while revealing the moderators' effects along with the direct impact of father-child, mother-child, and father-mother interactions by utilizing Structural Equation Modeling. An application of SEM allowed us to model unexplained variances and to analyze multiple potential factors of children's vocabulary simultaneously, linking micro and macro-perspectives to avoid misleading interpretations of the factors' effects. While classic estimation methods in SEM assume continuous normally distributed variables, the data collected for this research is mostly ordinal in nature. Thus, the design of this study specifically accounted for the ordinal variables used. The results revealed that when investigating the 'fathers and mother's degree of involvement predictors of child's vocabulary,' the 'status of mother and father cohabitation', 'mother's age', and 'father's attitude towards mother' variables should not be omitted in the model. Otherwise, the results could be misleading, inflating the effect of the father/mother's involvement in a child's activities on a child's speech.