"Assessing Measurement Invariance for Applied Research will provide psychometricians and researchers across diverse disciplines in the social sciences the necessary knowledge and skills to select and apply appropriate methods to assess measurement invariance. It is a user-friendly guide that describes a variety of statistical methods using a pedagogical framework emphasizing conceptual understanding with extensive illustrations that demonstrate how to use software to analyze real data. A companion website (people.umass.edu/cswells) provides downloadable computer syntax and the data sets demonstrated in this book so readers can use them to become familiar with the analyses and understand how to apply the methods with proficiency to their own work. Evidence-supported methods that can be readily applied to real world data are described and illustrated, providing researchers with many options from which to select given the characteristics of their data. The approaches include observed-score methods and those that use item response theory models and confirmatory factor analysis,"--