Clustered data arise in many settings, particularly within the social and biomedical sciences. For example, multiple-source reports are commonly collected in child and adolescent psychiatric epidemiologic studies where researchers use various informants (for instance, parents and adolescents) to...

Mediation analysis constitutes an important part of treatment study to identify the mechanisms by which an intervention achieves its effect. Structural equation model (SEM) is a popular framework for modeling such causal relationship. However, current methods impose various restrictions on the...