Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been applied in short-scale construction and model specification search. In the present study, we propose a bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underlying a…

Multilevel structural equation models (MSEMs) are well suited for educational research because they accommodate complex systems involving latent variables in multilevel settings. Estimation using Croon's bias-corrected factor score (BCFS) path estimation has recently been extended to MSEMs and demonstrated promise with limited sample sizes. This…

Factor score regression (FSR) is widely used as a convenient alternative to traditional structural equation modeling (SEM) for assessing structural relations between latent variables. But when latent variables are simply replaced by factor scores, biases in the structural parameter estimates often have to be corrected, due to the measurement error…