Estimation of composite reliability within a hierarchical modeling framework has recently become of particular interest given the growing recognition that the underlying assumptions of coefficient alpha are often untenable. Unfortunately, coefficient alpha remains the prominent estimate of reliability when estimating total scores from a scale with…

In the behavioral and social sciences, structural equation models (SEMs) have become widely accepted as a modeling tool for the relation between latent and observed variables. SEMs can be seen as a unification of several multivariate analysis techniques. SEM Trees combine the strengths of SEMs and the decision tree paradigm by building tree…