Structural Equation Modeling - An Accompanying Guide For The R Interface

Structural Equation Modeling with MPlus (Caron, 2019) is a reference book that, divided into three parts, discusses the basic functions of Mplus (Part 1 - The Basics), processing data with Mplus (Part 2 - Data Processing), and performing a set of statistical analyses involving structural equation modeling using Mplus (Part 3 - The Analyses). Recognizing the increasing use of structural equation modeling in the social sciences, as well as the limited number of educational resources available on this topic, we propose a companion guide to the third part of Caron's (2019) book, which will extend its application to the R programming interface. R is a freely available and very versatile programming interface that, similar to Mplus, allows for statistical analysis involving structural equation modeling. The purpose of this paper is to present the translation of the syntaxes from the third part of Caron's (2019) book into the R programming language, as well as the associated output results. Because this article is intended to serve as a companion guide to Caron's (2019) book, the theoretical underpinnings underlying the statistical analyses covered therein as well as the interpretation of the results from them are not the focus of this article. This article covers the following analyses: logistic regression, path analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, mediation, moderation, moderate mediation, latent class analysis, autoregressive and cross-autoregressive model analysis, latent path analysis, and multiple group analysis.