Introduction to the special section

Abstract

The papers in this section are based on presentations from the international conference of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS) ‘‘Advances in Latent Variables: Methods, Models and Applications’’. The conference was held in Brescia, Italy, on June 19–21, 2013, and included talks, posters, and symposia on topics related to the latent variable approach, from both methodological and applied points of view. The latent variable approach has a relevant role in theoretical and application contexts. The recent methodological developments allow to analyze complex problems typical of social and behavioral research. It is challenging to share with a broad scientific community the potentiality of these methods. A selection of extended papers is published in the Springer book Advances in Latent Variables, belonging to the series ‘Studies in Theoretical and Applied Statistics’ and in the following Springer Journals: Quality & Quantity, Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, Advances in Data Analysis and Classification. This special section collects both theoretical and applied contributions in the field of latent variable models. In particular, some of the articles tackle problems arising in model specification and estimation, some are devoted to the class of IRT models, and others deal with models for ordinal responses. The applications are mainly in the educational setting, spatial econometrics and sensorial data analysis.