The attached figure is from a journal article entitled "Neighborhood Social Disorder as a Determinant of Drug Injection Behaviors: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach" (Latkin, Williams, Wang, & Curry, 2005).
a. What are the four latent variables examined in this study?
b. What manifest variables were used to operationalize social disorder? Based on these manifest variables, explain in your own words what you think the authors mean by "social disorder."
c. Looking only at the latent variables, which two variables seem to be most strongly related to each other? What is the number on that path? Is it positive or negative, and what does the sign of the number indicate about the relation between these variables?
d. Looking only at the latent variables, what overall story is this model telling?