Social Science Data Analysis an Introduction

During the last two decades, structural equation modeling (SEM) has emerged as a powerful multivariate data analysis tool in social science research settings, especially in the fields of sociology, psychology, and education. Although its roots can be traced back to the first half of this century, when Spearman (1904) developed factor analysis and Wright (1934) introduced path analysis, it was not until the 1970s that the works by Karl Joreskog and his associates (e. g. , Joreskog, 1977; Joreskog and Van Thillo, 1973) began to make general SEM techniques accessible to the social and behavioral science research communities.

Data can be extremely valuable if we are able to extract information from them. This is why multivariate data analysis is essential for business and science. This book offers an easy-to-understand introduction to the most relevant methods of multivariate data analysis. It is strictly application-oriented, requires little knowledge of mathematics and statistics, demonstrates the procedures with numerical examples and illustrates each method via a case study solved with IBM’s statistical software package SPSS.