Amazon.com description: Product Description: LISREL 8 offers an impressive array of facilities for data analysis including indirect and total effects and their standard errors; direct specification of mean parameters; a Ridge Option for handling covariance and correlation matrices that are not positive-definitive; and modification indices for all iterative estimation methods. Advancements of special interest include:

* the new command language -- SIMPLIS -- that is easy to use and minimizes the possibility of mistakes in the problem set up;
* high quality path diagrams that can be produced on the screen and printed;
* many new measures that judge the fit of the model;
* linear and nonlinear constraints that may be imposed on any set of model parameters;
* general covariance structures that allow formulation of models that cannot be specified as LISREL models; and
* interval restrictions that may be imposed on any single parameter.

Advanced users will gain new insights into the use of asymptotically distribution-free (ADF) analysis, as well as power calculations for tests of model augmentation, automatic model modification, and other program features.

Included with LISREL 8 is PRELIS 2, a preprocessor for LISREL which greatly improves and accelerates analysis of binary, categorical, ordinal, censored, continuous, and/or incomplete data. New features of PRELIS 2 include:

* missing values on a variable that may be inputed by matching on other variables;
* new variables that may be created as functions of other variables;
* tests of univariate and multivariate normality that are obtained for all continuous variables;
* bootstrap estimates that may be obtained of the covariance matrix of correlations and other associations measures for which no asymptotic theory is available;
* univariate and multivariate multinomial probit models that may be estimated for any set of jointly dependent ordinal variables and any set of fixed or random covariates; and
* other features include an outprint that gives more information with improved presentation, a new and better estimation of asymptotic covariance matrices, several new options for threshold models, and a quicker speed than PRELIS 1.

LISREL 8 and PRELIS 2 are currently available for use on PCs utilizing MS-DOS, OS/2, and DOS extender systems.