Sociologists renamed path analysis as structural equation modeling (SEM), embraced diagrams, and used them extensively until 1970, when a computer package called LISREL automated the calculation of path coefficients (in some cases). Wright would have predicted what followed: path analysis turned into a rote method, and researchers became software users with little interest in what was going on under the hood. In the late 1980s, a public challenge (by statistician David Freedman) to explain the assumptions behind SEM went unanswered, and some leading SEM experts even disavowed that SEMs had
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This here is a big problem, thinking that a method will work out of the box, and nott thinking deeply about the method. Whether a method is applicable depends on the question asked, and therefore one must think deeply to moukd a solution to the problem, as opposed to forcing a solution onto a problem.
