SPECIFICATION, ESTIMATION, AND TESTING OF MOMENT STRUCTURE MODELS BASED ON LATENT VARIATES INVOLVING INTERACTIONS AMONG THE EXOGENOUS CONSTRUCTS

This article shows how methods for the analysis of moment structures b ased on latent variates can be used to investigate theories hypothesiz ing interactive effects of exogenous constructs on endogenous construc ts. Building on the work of Kenny and Judd, the authors discuss the sp ecification of structural equation models with latent interaction term s, and they show that the structural coefficient relating an endogenou s construct to the interaction of two exogenous constructs does not de pend on the origin of the components of the multiplicative exogenous c onstruct. The authors report evidence from simulations that the chi(2) statistics and standard errors provided by maximum likelihood and gen eralized least squares may not be trustworthy, but that model testing through robust and asymptotically distribution-free procedures leads t o appropriate assessments of model fit and the significance of paramet er estimates. They conclude the article with an application of the pro cedure to the context of expectancy-value attitude models.