Generalized Structured Component Analysis with Latent Interactions

• Activity Number: 186
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Heungsun Hwang*+ and Moon-Ho Ringo Ho and Jonathan Lee
• Companies: McGill University and Nanyang Technological University and California State University, Long Beach
• Keywords: Generalized structured component analysis ; Structural equation modeling ; Latent interaction

Abstract

Generalized structured component analysis (GSCA) is a component-based approach to structural equation modeling. In practice, researchers may often be interested in examining the interaction effects of latent variables. However, GSCA has been geared only for the specification and testing of the main effects of variables. Thus, an extension of GSCA is proposed to deal with various types of interactions among latent variables. In the proposed method, a latent interaction is defined as a product of latent variables. As a result, this method does not require the construction of additional indicators for latent interactions. Moreover, it can easily accommodate both exogenous and endogenous latent interactions. An application is presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.