A general class of latent variable models for ordinal manifest variables with covariate effects on the manifest and latent variables.

Previous work on a general class of multidimensional latent variable models for analysing ordinal manifest variables is extended here to allow for direct covariate effects on the manifest ordinal variables and covariate effects on the latent variables. A full maximum likelihood estimation method is used to estimate all the model parameters simultaneously. Goodness-of-fit statistics and standard errors are discussed. Two examples from the 1996 British Social Attitudes Survey are used to illustrate the methodology.