Hello! This week has been a great week so far, even though we’re only two or three days into it! I can’t say much has really changed since the week before, but… what can I say? Things feel different.
Since last week, I’ve been working on my Honors Thesis basically all weekend. I put eight hours into it on Friday, seven hours on Saturday (okay maybe ten, I might’ve gone home and stared at my model for hours afterwards), and 5 hours on Sunday; so there must have been some good stuff to come out of it, right? Some massive breakthrough or fantastic emerging narrative?
Negative.
After some 20 hours it became clear that I could not run my theoretical model or my variables through a structural equation modeling (SEM) software. The models (pictured below) are filled with continuous and binary variables, which don’t have error as observed variables, and as such, cannot be appropriately tested in this model. Beyond that, I also can’t have higher order variables containing both second order variables and observed variables. So doubly no.
This wasn’t honestly that crushing though, even though I had been dreaming about it for weeks before; I realized many things including how I could possible still do some sort of path analysis. I had spent two dozen hours doing research on statistical analysis and it had value! I found out that in education we often make these things called factor scores, which are compilations of observed and latent variables. So that’s what I think I’ll be spending my next two dozen hours on lol…
I really mean it though, I genuinely had nothing but fun staring at those webpages and clicking those shapes together in excel; I was inspired by the possibility of finding actual results, and interesting and insightful relationships between variables, and it made me feel like, “well, nothing else has been as you expected it for this paper, what’s stopping you from learning another entirely alien method of analysis and then becoming proficient at that?”, and that’s where I got to.
Well, I hope you like these models. They likely will be tested, just not using a SEM.
Tate
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