This year the Working Group Meeting was held at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in the beautiful “Festsaal” in the “Alte Aula”. The presented topics span from talks about Goodness-of-fit over dynamic latent class SEM to different estimation approaches like MIMIC Models, Panel Models and nonparametric Models. Some presentations breached the borders of SEM to find connections with Cognitive Diagnostic Modeling, Item Response Theory or Deep Learning technics. This sparked very interesting and long discussions about the spectrum of SEM and where the research is headed in the future. But also questions about the foundations of SEM and the very concept of measurement in latent variables were discussed in a very diverse group of Ph.D. candidates, Postdocs and Professors from Germany and across Europe. Overall it was a productive meeting in a very stimulating atmosphere created by the participants which hopefully lead to new perspectives and future collaborations.

Program SEM 2019

The SEM working group was founded in 1986. Meetings or small conferences have been held across Europe (e.g., Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland). The group has an informal character; there is no affiliation to any research organization. The main goal of the meetings is to exchange and discuss methodological problems and possible solutions in SEM and related fields. Presentations about ongoing research and doctoral theses are explicitly welcomed.

The meeting will last two days. Talks will be about 30 minutes including 10 to 15 minutes for discussion. Titles and abstracts of up to 200 words should be sent to Martin Stegmaier  martin.stegmaierspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de by December 21, 2018.

Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required.

We are looking forward to meeting you in Tübingen.

Kind regards,
Augustin Kelava and Stefano Noventa

Methods Center, University of Tübingen