Children's Reports of Parental Socioeconomic Status

An important class of applications of measurement error or constrained factor analytic models consists of comparing models for several populations. In such cases it is appropriate to make explicit statistical tests of model similarity across groups and to constrain some model parameters to be equal across groups using a priori substantive information. This article discusses a statistical model devel oped by Jöreskog for these purposes. The model is applied to children's and parents' reports of parental socioeconomic statuses for several grade levels.