Book Review: Raykov, T., & Marcoulides, G. A. (2006). A first course in structural equation modeling (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Abstract
James W.Bishop New Mexico State University The authors' stated aim in the second edition of their text is to provide a textbook for use in an introductory structural equation modeling (SEM) course that will introduce the audience to the basics of SEM in an updated, conceptual, and nonmathematical way. Their intended audience includes advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers with limited or no previous exposure to SEM. They also intend for this book to be a stand-alone precursor to advanced texts. In my judgment, Raykov and Marcoulides generally succeed in meeting their goals. The technique the authors use in most chapters to accomplish their objectives is to explain a concept of interest and the associated objective related to the concept and then demonstrate how to apply the concept and meet the objective using each of three of the more popular SEM software packages currently available: EQS (Bentler, 2004), LISREL (Joöreskog & Soörbom, 1993), and Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 2004). Chapter 1 does an excellent job of laying out the fundamentals of SEM. The explana- tion of the de nition of latent variables was particularly clear, as were the explanations of the most common types of structural equation