In the paper, some examples are presented to show some of the benefits of this modelling approach. For market research, SEM provides an opportunity (in fact, a requirement) to hypothesis models of market behaviour, and to test or confirm these models statistically. That is, on the basis of things we can measure, we attempt to make predictions of things we cannot measure.
Whilst being a sophisticated theoretical tool, and certainly not easy to implement, SEM actually underlies much of what practicing market researchers do on a daily basis. Abstract: Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is a technique which effectively subsumes a whole range of standard multivariate analysis methods, including regression, factor analysis and analysis of variance.
