Hello everyone,

hope you all had a good start of the week!

I have some doubts on how modeling control variables in Smartpls and processing the relative data! I have been reading tons of posts on the topic still I cannot understand two things:

1) I have AGE which is treated as a continuous variable. It would be also a control variable. When modeling it in PLS should I create a FORMATIVE LATENT VARIABLE with one single indicator? Is that acceptable?

2) Education is a categorical variable and it also will be one of my control variables. Below the 5 values and labels.

1=less than high school

2=high school

3=bachelor's degree

4=master's degree

5=doctoral degree

I created 5 dummy variables on SPSS. Should I now create on PLS another Formative Latent Variable with those 5 dummies as indicators pointing at it? Or should I follow the rule of 5-1 and have just 4 dummy variables excluding one of those I created always all pointing at the new latent variable created?

Or maybe should I create as many latent variables as the number of dummies variables and then link each latent to each dummy as an indicator?

Thank you in advance for your reply!