LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF COMPLEX SURVEY DATA WITH LISREL

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alcohol abuse has become a major public health concern in the United States. In view of the enormous costs involved in addressing this problem, it is imperative that researchers have access to appropriate statistical tools to analyze their data. In terms of statistical methodology, there has been a growing interest in recent years in fitting models to data collected from longitudinal surveys using complex sample designs. This interest reflects the needs of policy makers and researchers for in-depth studies of social processes over time. Many of the longitudinal studies on alcohol abuse are characterized by the fact that each individual longitudinal record is short, while the number of records is large. Consequently, software for structural equation modeling (SEM) and multilevel modeling is used to analyze these longitudinal data sets. We propose to develop the existing LISREL program to provide researchers with an integrated platform for the analysis of longitudinal data from complex sampling designs. This version of LISREL will handle structural equation models, multilevel models, and generalized linear models with continuous, ordinal, and nominal outcome variables.