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Acknowledgments

Throughout the three years in which this monograph was conceived, drafted, and refined, we have benefited from the kind advice and guidance of a great many of our colleagues. Heartfelt thanks go out to M. Murat Ardag, Nemanja Batrićević, Alexander Bor, Amélie Godefroidt, Jochen Mayerl, Martin Mölder, Ulrich Schroeders, and Federico Vegetti for offering feedback at different stages of the project. Without their consistent help, the difficult content we cover would have been even more impenetrable. We also extend our thanks to participants in the workshops and courses on multilevel structural equation models that we have led during this time. These include the October 2017 MSEM workshop at the University of Bamberg organized by Thomas Saalfeld, especially to Sebastian Jungkunz; the October 2018 MSEM workshop at the Meth-Lab of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven organized by Amélie Godefroidt and Lala Muradova; two courses in multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) taught at the 2016 and 2017 editions of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Summer School in Methods and Techniques at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary; and, finally, a course in advanced structural equation modeling (SEM) taught at the 2017 edition of the same Summer School. Their questions have repeatedly challenged our thinking, in addition to highlighting areas where our explanations could be clearer.

Last but not least, we owe a debt of gratitude to Yves Rosseel for creating the lavaan scripts for some of the models in this book and Linda Muthén of the Mplus team for her speedy response to our questions. Whatever errors have persisted in the book are entirely our own and represent but a small sample of what could have been had the previously mentioned colleagues not generously shared their time, thoughts, and expertise with us.

Our work on this manuscript has been supported in many other ways as well, chief among them being the support staff at the various methods schools and workshops where we have tested our ideas. We wish to thank Miriam Schneider and Dagmar Riess at the University of Bamberg, Anna Foley and Becky Plant from ECPR’s Central Services, and the local organizing team in Budapest, especially Carsten Q. Schneider and Robert Sata. We are also grateful for the opportunity to teach these courses to Derek Beach and Benoît Rihoux, who join Levente Littvay as the academic conveners of the ECPR Methods Schools.

Separately, we wish to extend our gratitude to additional valued colleagues. Manuel Bosancianu wishes to thank Zoltán Fazekas for answering many multilevel modeling (MLM) questions over the years, as well as Macartan Humphreys for his feedback and support. Levente Littvay wishes to thank Elmar Schlüter, Bengt Muthén, and Geoffrey Hubona for the MSEM-specific inspiration and, more generally, all the people who handed him QASS series books throughout his studies: Kevin Smith (v22, v79), Brian Humes (v122), Julia McQuillian (v143), Craig Enders (v136), Jim Bovaird (v95, v116, v144, and probably more), and to the loving memory of Allan McCutcheon (v64, but also v126, v119), who started his post-PhD career even before his PhD started by putting him in touch with Tamás Rudas (who wrote v119 and v142). These people, along with Les Hayduk and Mike Neale, shaped his methodological thinking the most and gave him the tools to pass knowledge on to the next generation of outstanding scholars, such as his coauthors and many of the people thanked above for their help and support. This book is dedicated to them as it is very much also their contribution (although he is fairly sure Les and Tamás would not approve much of what is written here, but maybe the final paragraph).

Collectively, we would like to express our gratitude to Barbara Entwisle, Katie Metzler, Megan O’Heffernan, and Helen Salmon from SAGE for their logistic support, advice, and understanding along the entire length of the writing process, as well as to the multiple anonymous reviewers who suggested many invaluable improvements and corrections.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

SAGE would also like to acknowledge the valuable contributions of the following reviewers:

Carl Berning, University of Mainz

Kyungkook Kang, University of Central Florida

Carl L. Palmer, Illinois State University

Ronny Scherer, University of Oslo

Companion Website

A website for the book at http://levente.littvay.hu/msem/ includes replication codes for lavaan for R and Mplus, data for all the examples reported, and two files to produce all equations and figures from the book.