• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.61-74
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• 2015

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a widely used in social sciences such as education, business administration, and psychology. In SEM, the latent variable score is the estimate of the latent variable which cannot be observed directly. This study uses stagewise structural equation modeling(stagewise SEM; SSEM) by partitioning the whole model into several stages. The traditional estimation method minimizes the discrepancy function using the variance-covariance of all observed variables. This method can lead to inappropriate situations where exogenous latent variables may be affected by endogenous latent variables. The SSEM approach can avoid such situations and reduce the complexity of the whole SEM in estimating parameters.