Methodological problems of estimating latent interaction effects Methodologische Probleme der Schätzung von latenten Interaktionseffekten

Approaches developed for the analysis of latent interaction effects are confronted with several methodological problems resulting from measurement error of indicator variables, nonlinearity of parameters, specification of mean structures, inadequate variable transformations, and, as the major characteristic of interaction models, non-normally distributed variables. While some of these problems can be solved with covariance structure analysis or least squares estimation procedures in structural equation modeling, the new approach ``Latent Moderated Structural Equations (LMS)'' (Klein & Moosbrugger, submitted; Klein, in prep.) is the only method that takes the non-normal distributions of latent interaction models explicitly into account. LMS produces maximum likelihood estimates by analyzing mixture densities with the EM algorithm, provides efficient parameter estimates and yields unbiased standard error estimates for inferential statistics. unknown publishedVersion