Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

Application: Replication of Second-Order Factor

While intriguing, and perhaps conceptually sensible, these results are not definitive, and the replicability of second-order factors is not well-studied. It is also possible (or likely) that this scale should have been a single-factor scale from the beginning. As mentioned previously, the best way to test this competing hypothesis is to perform confirmatory factor analysis comparing model fit between the three-factor model, the three-factor model with a higher-order factor, and a one-factor model, using a different, large sample. Then, and only then, would we be able to draw conclusions about the best fitting model for this data. For now, let us take a simple example of replication and see how well ...