Applications of multilevel structural equation modeling to cross-cultural research

Multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) has been proposed as an extension to structural equation modeling for analyzing data with nested structure. We have begun to see a few applications in cross-cultural research in which MSEM fits well as the statistical model. However, given that cross-cultural studies can only afford collecting data from a relatively small number of countries, the appropriateness of MSEM has been questioned. Using the data from the International Social Survey Program (1997; N = 15,244 from 27 countries), we first showed how Muthen's MSEM procedure could be applied to a real data set on cross-cultural research. Given a small country-level sample size (27 countries) we then demonstrated that results on the individual level were quite stable even when using small individual-level sample sizes, whereas the group-level parameter estimates and their standard errors were affected unsystematically by varying individual-level sample sizes. Use of the findings for cross-cultural research and other areas with limited numbers of groups are discussed.