Path analysis

From Psychology Wiki

Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help

Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language
Personality | Philosophy | Research Methods | Social | Statistics

Statistics: Scientific method · Research methods · Experimental design · Undergraduate statistics courses · Statistical tests · Game theory · Decision theory

---

In statistics, path analysis is a type of multiple regression analysis. The term path analysis has been used to refer to the analysis of causal models when single indicators are employed for each of the variables in the model. Other terms used to refer to this model are causal modeling, analysis of covariance structures, latent variable models, structural modeling, and structural equation modeling. In the hypothetical model below, the two exogenous variables are taken as correlated and are shown to have direct as well as indirect effects (through En1) on En2.

Using the same variables, alternative models are conceivable. For example, it may be hypothesized that Ex1 has only an indirect effect on En2, thus the arrow from to Ex1 to En2 would be deleted. It may be that the endogenous variables (dependent variables) are also affected by variables other than the identified exogenous variables (independent variables) and thus not in the model. The effects of such extraneous variables are depicted by the various e’s in the figure.

[edit] See Also

• Causality
• Causal analysis
• Factor analysis
• Latent variable model
• Multiple regression
• Structural equation model

[edit] References

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Path analysis (statistics). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.