Week 1: History and Overview

The first week of the class was a historical review of SEM and path analysis from my own (perhaps skewed) viewpoint.

Three critical readings that will help put this class in context are:

Spearman, C.(1904). General intelligence objectively determined and measured. American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201–293.

Wright, S.(1920). The relative importance of heredity and environment in determining the piebald pattern of guinea–pigs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6, 320–332.

Duncan, O. D.(1966). Path analysis: Sociological examples. The American Journal of Sociology, 72(1), 1–16.

Also, there's a nice history of SEM in

Wolfle, L. M. (1999). Sewall wright on the method of path coefficients: An annotated bibliography. Structural Equation Modeling, 6(3), 280–291.

The slides for the first class are attached below.