TEACHER'S CORNER: Structural Equation Modeling With the sem Package in R

R is free, open-source, cooperatively developed software that implements the S statistical programming language and computing environment. The current capabilities of R are extensive, and it is in wide use, especially among statisticians. The sem package provides basic structural equation modeling facilities in R, including the ability to fit structural equations in observed variable models by two-stage least squares, and to fit latent variable models by full information maximum likelihood assuming multinormality. This article briefly describes R, and then proceeds to illustrate the use of the tsls and sem functions in the sem package. The article also demonstrates the integration of the sem package with other facilities available in R, for example for computing polychoric correlations and for bootstrapping.