Hi everyone! I am currently working on constructing a true/false binary response questionnaire of parenting knowledge. I found out that factor analysis is not appropriate for binary variables. Also I have read articles about principal component analysis, and polychoric and tetrachoric correlations, but found no examples on how to use these concepts for scale construction. Anyone knows about specific SPSS steps, other programs or plug-ins and interpretation for scale constructing for these analyses? Is there any other appropriate analysis? I would be thankful of any help!
Maria Acevedo Velazquez, unless there has been new developments in SPSS that I am not aware of, I do not think that you can perform a factor analysis with binary variables in SPSS. However, this is readily possible in software like Stata (gsem command), Mplus and R (lavaan package).
You might want to look at item response theory, and try fitting a rasch model (you can do this in R - but I am afraid I can't remember the package name). Not sure if SPSS can do this, but worth checking...
Hello Maria,
If you use the R plug-in for spss, then yes, there are a lot of things (including IRT) that you can do (see this link for information: https://developer.ibm.com/technologies/analytics/tutorials/ba-call-r-spss/).
On the other hand, the free, stand-alone program, FACTOR, handles the polychoric correlations quite nicely and offers many features not readily available in spss (such as parallel analysis) for factor analytic studies:Article FACTOR: A computer program to fit the exploratory factor ana...
Good luck with your work.
Hello Maria,
You can be using the FACTOR program or Rash model with the R program.
Thank you all for your help!!! I will check how the FACTOR program and the R plug in for spss work. If anyone has knowledge of an article or a chapter of a book with examples on how to run and interpret these analyses for scale construction, please let me know. :)
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