Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) refers to the FA procedure with some loadings constrained to be zeros. A difficulty in CFA is that the constraint must be specified by users in a subjective manner. For dealing with ...Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) refers to the FA procedure with some loadings constrained to be zeros. A difficulty in CFA is that the constraint must be specified by users in a subjective manner. For dealing with this difficulty, we propose a computational method, in which the best CFA solution is obtained optimally without relying on users’ judgements. The method consists of the procedures at lower (L) and higher (H) levels: at the L level, for a fixed number of zero loadings, it is determined both which loadings are to be zeros and what values are to be given to the remaining nonzero parameters;at the H level, the procedure at the L level is performed over the different numbers of zero loadings, to provide the best solution. In the L level procedure, Kiers’ (1994) simplimax rotation fulfills a key role: the CFA solution under the constraint computationally specified by that rotation is used for initializing the parameters of a new FA procedure called simplimax FA. The task at the H level can be easily performed using information criteria. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated numerically.展开更多
文摘Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) refers to the FA procedure with some loadings constrained to be zeros. A difficulty in CFA is that the constraint must be specified by users in a subjective manner. For dealing with this difficulty, we propose a computational method, in which the best CFA solution is obtained optimally without relying on users’ judgements. The method consists of the procedures at lower (L) and higher (H) levels: at the L level, for a fixed number of zero loadings, it is determined both which loadings are to be zeros and what values are to be given to the remaining nonzero parameters;at the H level, the procedure at the L level is performed over the different numbers of zero loadings, to provide the best solution. In the L level procedure, Kiers’ (1994) simplimax rotation fulfills a key role: the CFA solution under the constraint computationally specified by that rotation is used for initializing the parameters of a new FA procedure called simplimax FA. The task at the H level can be easily performed using information criteria. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated numerically.
