An empirical sampling approach was used to assess the magnitude of the sampling errors of statistics which describe a recursive causal model based on survey data gathered with four complex sample designs which are commonly used in educational research. The influence of the complex sample designs on sampling errors was shown to be capable of seriously distorting statistical confidence intervals. The jackknife and the balanced half-sample error estimation techniques were applied to this recursive causal model in order to evaluate. their capacity for estimating sampling errors from single samples of data.