Hi Rick,

The company I work for (Fors Marsh Group LLC) has many clients that want to understand the problems they're having as much as they're interested in getting an answer to them.

Data mining algorithms (random forests, boosted regressions) provide good answers, but are borderline useless for presenting to clients who aren't interested in the technical aspects of their problems. By contrast, we have used SEM for many clients interested in getting more invested in understanding their customers/clients/markets - both in terms of using the SEM for modeling survey data, as well as for market segmentation purposes.

I would also say that a great many researchers in organizational behavior and human resource management (housed in business schools) use SEM to model survey data that traditionally are collected on working adults to increase generalizability to the working world.

Hi Rick,

Are there any academic or research papers that you can recommend on the applications of SEM models in Business cases.

Thanks.