Department of Statistics, UCLA

Using existing technology, it can be hard or impossible to determine whether two structural equation models that are being considered may be nested. There is also no routine technology for evaluating whether two very different structural models may be equivalent. A simple procedure is proposed that uses model-reproduced moment matrices to evaluate both model nesting and equivalence. Two standard applications are to verify whether or not two proposed models are equivalent, and whether a baseline model used in an incremental fit index is appropriately nested.