Confirmatory factor analysis – Amos
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[edit] Warning
It may seem odd to begin with a warning, but the popular misuse of Confirmatory Factor Analysis is so widespread that users of this wiki should be aware of some of the issues involved before they begin. While this warning is overly brief, you can follow-up these issues and more in the Further Reading section of this article. A number of these issues apply to Structural Equation Modeling more generally (also known as Causal Equation Modeling). While confirmatory factor analysis has been popular in recent years to test the degree of fit between a proposed structural model and the emergent structure of the data, the pendulum has swung back to favor exploratory analysis for a couple of key reasons. Firstly the results of confirmatory factor analysis are typically misinterpreted to support one structural solution over any other. This conclusion is particularly weak when only a few of the many possible structures were assessed. Secondly, replicating a structure through successive unconstrained exploratory procedures is considered much stronger evidence of structure than an unreplicated constrained confirmatory procedure. So unless you are absolutely sure that you should be doing a confirmatory procedure (for example, developing a theory which may be empirically tested later), stick with an exploratory procedure.
