This course is aimed at faculty and students with an introductory understanding of structural equation methods who seek a better understanding of the challenging process of making judgments about the adequacy of their models. Those who attend should have experience in fitting structural equation models with software such as LISREL, MPlus, EQS, or AMOS. Attendees will be expected to bring their own laptop computers installed with their SEM software, and they should also know how to import data from an SPSS save file into their SEM software program. Attendees will learn out to interpret and report results from SEM analyses, and how to conduct model comparisons to obtain information relevant to inferences about their models, as advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to model evaluation are considered.

The course will consist of five sections, with each section having a lecture and lab component using exercises and data provided by the instructor:

Review of model specification and parameter estimation
Overview of model evaluation
Logic and computations for goodness-of-fit measures
Analysis of residuals and latent variables
Model comparison strategies

Dr. Larry J. Williams joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University (V.C.U.) as University Professor of Management in August of 1997, and previously he was an Associate Professor and Jay Ross Young Faculty Scholar at the Krannert School of Management of Purdue University (1987-1996) and the Fisher Distinguished Scholar in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program at the University of Tennessee (1996-1997). Dr. Williams served as the Founding Editor of Organizational Research Methods (ORM), a journal sponsored by the Research Methods Division (RMD) of the Academy of Management, and he previously served as Consulting Editor for the Research Methods and Analysis section of the Journal of Management (1993-1996). Dr. Williams also has served as Chairperson for the Research Methods Division (RMD) of the Academy of Management and he established and currently serves as Director of the Center for the Advancement of Research Methods and Analysis (CARMA).

Among his recent accomplishments, in 2004 Dr. Williams was recognized by the Southern Management Association as an author of 2 of the 6 most highly cited articles in the 30 year history of the Journal of Management. He was also elected in 2004 to be a member of the Society for Organizational Behavior, an international group of approximately 80 leading scholars from the field of organizational behavior. In 2005, Dr. Williams was selected to be the recipient of the 2005 Distinguished Career Contributions Award by the Academy of Management’s Research Methods Division. In 2008, Professor Williams was recognized as one of the 150 most-cited authors in the field of management (1981-2004) in an article published in the Journal of Management.