Confirmatory Factor Analysis for Applied Research (Methodology in the Social Sciences)

Emphasizing practical and theoretical aspects of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) rather than mathematics or formulas, Timothy A. Brown uses rich examples derived from the psychology, management, and sociology literatures to provide in-depth treatment of the concepts, procedures, pitfalls, and extensions of CFA methodology. Chock full of useful advice and tables that outline the procedures, the text shows readers how to conduct exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and understand similarities to and differences from CFA; formulate, program, and interpret CFA models using popular latent variable software packages such as LISREL, Mplus, Amos, EQS, and SAS/CALIS; and report results from a CFA study. Also covered are extensions of CFA to traditional IRT analysis, methods for determining necessary sample sizes, and new CFA modeling possibilities, including multilevel factor models and factor mixture models. Special features include a Web page offering data and program syntax files for many of the research examples so that readers can practice the procedures described in the book with real data. The Web page also includes links to additional CFA-related resources.