Longitudinal Research with Latent Variables

Since Charles Spearman published his seminal paper on factor analysis in 1904 and Karl Joresk ¨ og replaced the observed variables in an econometric structural equation model by latent factors in 1970, causal modelling by means of latent variables has become the standard in the social and behavioural sciences. Indeed, the central va- ables that social and behavioural theories deal with, can hardly ever be identified as observed variables. Statistical modelling has to take account of measure...