Statistics

Psychology

Mathematics

Confirmatory factor analysis

Square (algebra)

Medicine

Geometry

Structural equation modeling

Journal of Advanced Nursing

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) aims to confirm a theoretical model using empirical data and is an element of the broader multivariate technique structural equation modelling (SEM; Alavi et al., 2020). CFA is commonly used across clinical research (Brown, 2015; Kääriäinen et al., 2011) including the development and psychometric evaluation of measurement instruments. The three main uses of CFA in psychometric evaluation studies are construct validity evaluation, response pattern comparison, and competing model comparison (Sun, 2005), with construct validity evaluation the most widely used CFA application. A fundamental characteristic of CFA is its hypothesis-driven approach (Brown, 2015). The researcher first establishes a hypothesis regarding the model structure expressed as particular factor(s) underlying a set of items. Analysis is then performed to determine how much of the covariance between the items would be captured by the hypothesized factor structure (Hooper, Coughlan, & Mullen, 2008). In addition...

Chi‐square for model fit in confirmatory factor analysis