In this week’s episode Greg and Patrick talk with Ken Bollen who is a Professor of Psychology and Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to exploring topics including home made rockets, sitars, and Jimi Hendrix, Ken talks with them about his brand new book Elements of Structural Equation Models and how he aspired to capture the many recent developments in SEM that have occurred since his monumental 1989 book on the same topic. Along the way they also discuss brushes with greatness, naughty bits, Mick Jagger, sharing a urinal, marginal notes, stranded in Brussels, matching t-shirts, asbestos walls, ruby rods, choosing between physics, chemistry, or terrorism, General Motors, the Berlin Wall, dust cover quotes, the fine print, side effects, elevated heart rates, cited but not read, Ravi Shankar, and matching BMWs.
Related Episodes
- S5E23: A Rosetta Stone for DAGs and SEM
- S4E02: Underachievers, Overachievers, & Maximum Likelihood Estimation
- S2E17: Embracing Your Non-Normality
- S1E14: Model Fit & The Curse of the Black Pearl
Recommended Readings
Bollen, K. A. (1979). Political democracy and the timing of development. American Sociological Review, 572-587.
Bollen, K. A. (1980). Issues in the comparative measurement of political democracy. American Sociological Review, 370-390.
Bollen, K. A. (1987). Total, direct, and indirect effects in structural equation models. Sociological Methodology, 37-69.
Bollen, K. A. (1989). Structural equations with latent variables. John Wiley & Sons.
Bollen, K. A. (1996). An alternative two stage least squares (2SLS) estimator for latent variable equations. Psychometrika, 61, 109-121.
Bollen, K. A., & Curran, P. J. (2006). Latent curve models: A structural equation perspective. John Wiley & Sons.
Bollen, K. A. (2023). Causal inference with binary treatments from randomization versus binary treatments from categorization. Psychological Methods. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000617
Bollen, K.A. (2026). Elements of structural equation models (SEMs). Cambridge University Press.