New Trends in Psychometrics 1 Using a Mixture Latent Markov Model to Analyze Longitudinal U.S. Employment Data Involving Measurement Error

Latent Markov modeling is used as an alternative to the Current Population Survey (Census, 2002) reinterviewing methodology for estimating the measure-ment error in the recorded employment status. This alternative methodology, which is implemented in the syntax version the Latent GOLD program, turns out to be a promising new approach for estimating measurement error in longitudinal surveys. However, it is important to take into account unobserved heterogeneity in the initial-state and transition probabilities because the size of the measurement error is overestimated when unobserved heterogeneity is not taken into account