I am reading some material about structural equation modeling. I found it to be extremely similar to confirmatory factor analysis – modeling a construct as the linear combination of several other measures or constructs plus an error term. And the software package that can perform CFA can also perform SEM.
So I am wondering what is the difference between these two models?
Best Answer
SEM is an umbrella term. CFA is the measurement part of SEM, which shows relationships between latent variables and their indicators. The other part is the structural component, or the path model, which shows how the variables of interest (often latent variables) are related.
You can run CFA alone, path analysis alone, or a full SEM. Path analysis is SEM without latent variables.