Diagnostic Study of Problems under Asymptotically Generalized Least Squares Estimation of Physical Health Model

This study examined those problems noticed under the Asymptotically Generalized Least Squares estimator in evaluating a structural model of physical health. The problems were highly correlated parameter estimates and high standard errors of some parameter estimates. Separate analyses of the endogenous part of the model and of the metric of a latent factor revealed a highly skewed and kurtotic measurement indicator as the focal point of the manifested problems. Since the sample sizes are far below that needed to produce adequate AGLS estimates in the given modeling conditions, the adequacy of the Maximum Likelihood estimator is further examined with the robust statistics and the bootstrap method. These methods demonstrated that the ML methods were unbiased and statistical decisions based upon the ML standard errors remained almost the same. Suggestions are made for future studies adopting structural equation modeling technique in terms of selecting of a reference indicator and adopting those statistics corrected for nonormality.