Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.
X
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • EFA - Heywood case, not sure how to interpret

    Hello Statalisters,

    I am using Stata/IC 15.0 for Mac (64-bit Intel). I have time series data of an emotions survey that is embedded within a hypermedia science tutoring and assessment platform. The emotions values are Likert type, 1-5 range.

    In the long term I want to explore measurement invariance across time points. First step I understand to be using EFA at each time point to see how many factors may exist. Here is the code I am using for the 6 time points.

    foreach i of num 1/6 {
    factor P_enjoyment`i' P_hopeful`i' P_proud`i' P_surprised`i' P_curious`i' N_frustrated`i' N_anxious`i' N_ashamed`i' N_hopeless`i' N_bored`i' N_confused`i' N_sad`i' , ml blanks (.3)
    screeplot
    graph export xscree`i'.png, replace
    rotate, oblimin blanks(.3)
    }


    On all the timepoints except 5, Heywood case is encountered. This seems to be associated with the fact that eigenvalues do not descend in the correct order. For example (see eigenvalue in red):


    Factor analysis/correlation Number of obs = 189
    Method: maximum likelihood Retained factors = 7
    Rotation: (unrotated) Number of params = 63
    Schwarz's BIC = 331.613
    Log likelihood = -.6915937 (Akaike's) AIC = 127.383

    Beware: solution is a Heywood case
    (i.e., invalid or boundary values of uniqueness)

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Factor | Eigenvalue Difference Proportion Cumulative
    -------------+------------------------------------------------------------
    Factor1 | 1.92857 -1.93710 0.2316 0.2316
    Factor2 | 3.86566 2.71819 0.4643 0.6960
    Factor3 | 1.14748 0.61079 0.1378 0.8338
    Factor4 | 0.53669 0.20229 0.0645 0.8982
    Factor5 | 0.33440 0.02817 0.0402 0.9384
    Factor6 | 0.30622 0.09969 0.0368 0.9752
    Factor7 | 0.20654 . 0.0248 1.0000
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    LR test: independent vs. saturated: chi2(66) = 1046.63 Prob>chi2 = 0.0000
    LR test: 7 factors vs. saturated: chi2(3) = 1.31 Prob>chi2 = 0.7259
    (tests formally not valid because a Heywood case was encountered)



    I understand Heywood cases to be concerned with lack of variance in the data. However I am not sure how to solve this issue. Is it that the responses may not have sufficient variation for EFA to be accurately estimated? Is EFA the wrong choice for the Likert data? Maybe I should be using polychoric correlation in EFA instead....?

    In advance I appreciate any advice the forum can offer.

    Many thanks,
    Jeanne

  • #2
    Update: I was previously using maximum likelihood, and now using pf it appears to be running without producing Heywood errors.

    Comment

    Working...
    X