A modified tucker’s congruence coefficient for factor matching

Anikó Lovik,Geert Verbeke,Vahid Nassiri,Geert Molenberghs

doi:10.5964/meth.2813

Abstract

Since factor analysis is one of the most often used techniques in psychometrics, comparing or combining solutions from different factor analyses is often needed. Several measures to compare factors exist, one of the best known is Tucker’s congruence coefficient, which is enjoying newly found popularity thanks to the recent work of Lorenzo-Seva and ten Berge (2006), who established cut-off values for factor congruence. While this coefficient is in most cases very good in comparing factors in general, it also has some disadvantages, which can cause trouble when one needs to compare or combine many analyses. In this paper, we propose a modified Tucker’s congruence coefficient to address these issues.

Highlights

Since factor analysis is one of the most often used techniques in psychometrics, comparing or combining solutions from different factor analyses is often needed
Similar results have been achieved with different means (0 and 0.20) for cross-loadings, with higher means showing a greater advantage of the mTCC over the Tucker’s congruence coefficient” (TCC)
This method results in much higher values for incongruent factor pairs but for pairs with a TCC ≥ 0.95 the change is minimal

Summary

Introduction

Since factor analysis is one of the most often used techniques in psychometrics, comparing or combining solutions from different factor analyses is often needed. When such an analysis is compared to one where the negatively framed items were reversed before the analysis, the result is an extremely low TCC indicating incongruence while the modified coefficient will be high, indicating congruence.

Results

Conclusion