A Step-by-Step Guide The use of latent variable models has seen a tremendous amount of growth in the past 30 years across a variety of academic disciplines, including the sciences, clinical professions, business, and even the humanities. Part of the reason for this growth is the increasing availability of software to estimate these models’ parameters. Traditionally, most of this software has either been too expensive or too complicated for anyone without access to the resources of a large business or university. This trend is rapidly changing, however, and there are now free programs that can conduct a latent variable analysis with only a modicum of knowledge about statistical programming.