Skip to content
Prev 173799 / 398503 Next

SEM model testing with identical goodness of fits (2)

Dear Hyena,

Your model  is of three correlated factors accounting for the 
observed variables.
Those three correlations may be accounted for equally well by 
correlations (loadings) of the lower order factors with a general 
factor.
Those two models are  indeed equivalent models and will, as a 
consequence have exactly equal fits and dfs.

Call the three correlations rab, rac, rbc.  Then a higher order 
factor model will have loadings of
fa, fb and fc, where fa*fb = rab, fa*bc = rac, and fb*fc = rbc.
You can solve for fa, fb and fc in terms of  factor inter-correlations.

You can not compare the one to the other, for they are equivalent models.

You can examine how much of the underlying variance of the original 
items is due to the general factor by considering a bi-factor 
solution where the general factor loads on each of the observed 
variables and a set of residual group factors account for the 
covariances within your three domains.  This can be done in an 
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) context using the omega function in 
the psych package. It is possible to then take that model and test it 
using John Fox's sem package to evaluate the size of each of the 
general and group factor loadings.   (A discussion of how to do that 
is at http://www.personality-project.org/r/book/psych_for_sem.pdf ).

Bill
At 4:25 PM +0800 3/15/09, hyena wrote: