AUTHOR=Kelava Augustin , Brandt Holger TITLE=A general non-linear multilevel structural equation mixture model JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=5 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00748 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00748 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

In the past 2 decades latent variable modeling has become a standard tool in the social sciences. In the same time period, traditional linear structural equation models have been extended to include non-linear interaction and quadratic effects (e.g., Klein and Moosbrugger, 2000), and multilevel modeling (Rabe-Hesketh et al., 2004). We present a general non-linear multilevel structural equation mixture model (GNM-SEMM) that combines recent semiparametric non-linear structural equation models (Kelava and Nagengast, 2012; Kelava et al., 2014) with multilevel structural equation mixture models (Muthén and Asparouhov, 2009) for clustered and non-normally distributed data. The proposed approach allows for semiparametric relationships at the within and at the between levels. We present examples from the educational science to illustrate different submodels from the general framework.