# Constraining latent variance of the slope across groups in lavaan

lavaan provides a function for measuring measurement invariance (measurementInvariance()). However, let's say that I want to test structural invariance (e.g. ch. 9 in Byrne 2016), how can I accomplish this?

If I want to constrain the latent slope parameter to be the same across two groups I can add the following on a separate row in my formula:

s ~ c(M.slope, M.slope)*1


However, how can I constrain the latent variance of the slope to be the same across groups? I can use group.equal=lv.variances, but that will constrain the latent variance of both the intercept and the slope, and I only want to constrain the variance of the slope.

library(RCurl)
library(lavaan)
x <- getURL("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/aronlindberg/dfa0115f1d80b84ebd48b3ed52f9c5ac/raw/3abf0f280a948d6273a61a75415796cc103f20e7/growth_data.csv")

model_regressions <- ' i =~ 1*t1 + 1*t2 + 1*t3 + 1*t4 + 1*t5 + 1*t6 + 1*t7 + 1*t8 + 1*t9 + 1*t10 + 1*t11 + 1*t12 + 1*t13+ 1*t14 + 1*t15 + 1*t16 + 1*t17 + 1*t18 + 1*t19 + 1*t20
s =~ 0*t1 + 1*t2 + 2*t3 + 3*t4 + 4*t5 + 5*t6 + 6*t7 + 7*t8 + 8*t9 + 9*t10 + 10*t11 + 11*t12 + 12*t13 + 13*t14 + 14*t15 + 15*t16 + 16*t17 + 17*t18 + 18*t19 + 19*t20

# fixing error-variances
t8 ~~ 0.01*t8
t17 ~~ 0.01*t17
t18 ~~ 0.01*t18
# regressions
s ~ h_index
i ~ h_index'

fit_UNconstrained <- growth(model_regressions, data=growth_data, group = "type")


# References

Barbara Byrne, 2016, Structural Equation Modeling With AMOS: Basic Concepts, Applications, and Programming, Third Edition, Routledge.

Your data might have issues. Although you wish to fit a growth model, some participants (n=6) do not have any growth at all and thus have no within-person variance. Fully 135 of participants have less than 10 unique observations.

> uniques=numeric(nrow(growth_data))
> for(i in  1:nrow(growth_data)){
+   length(unique(c(growth_data[i,2:21])))
+ }
> uniques=numeric(nrow(growth_data))
> for(i in  1:nrow(growth_data)){
+   uniques[i]=length(unique(c(growth_data[i,2:21])))
+ }
> uniques
[1] 20 19 18 18  6 13 19 17 15  7 12 17 15  5 17 15 14 14 10 11  6  7 11 15 13 12 14 13 14 12 13 11 13 13 12 11 11 11 11 11 11  9 11  9
[45] 10  9  8  9  8  9  8  6  7  6  6  6  6  6  6  6  4  5  5  5  5  2  4  4  4  3  3  2  2  3  3  3  2  2  2  2  2  1  2  2  2  1  1 14
[89] 13 20 20 18 17 10 19 19 18 13 10 10 18 16 18 17 15 18 17 16 16 16 13 16 15 15 13 15 14 14 10  8 15 14 13 11 11  9  4  2 14 13 11  8
[133] 13 12 12 11 11  2 10 10 10 10  8  5  9  9  9  9  9  8  8  6  7  5  8  8  8  8  8  6  8  4  4  5  5  7  6  5  6  5  5  4  5  2  4  5
[177]  5  5  4  4  3  4  4  3  3  2  1  3  3  3  3  3  3  3  3  1  3  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  2  1
> sum(uniques==1)
[1] 6
> sum(uniques<=10)
[1] 135

• There is no problem with the data--this is how it is structured. – histelheim Jan 10 at 19:51