Why is it important to evaluate factor indeterminacy and factor score estimates?


       Factor score indeterminacy presents a number of fascinating and difficult measurement problems that were recently debated and discussed in a special issue of Multivariate Behavioral Research. Readers who wish to delve into the measurement problems surrounding factor score indeterminacy should read all fifteen articles that appeared in that issue. The focus of this web site, however, is exclusively on the practical nature of the problem (which was also addressed in the special issue of MBR). Although it may not be immediately apparent, theoretical – and perhaps even philosophical – measurement issues always have important practical implications for applied research. Factor score indeterminacy is no exception, and there are at least four reasons why researchers should be concerned with this issue in the context of an exploratory factor analysis:

  1. A highly indeterminate factor is one in which radically different factor scores can be computed that will all be consistent with the same factor loadings (pattern coefficients) derived from the factor analysis. As mentioned above, individuals with high scores according to one set of factor scores can have low scores according to a competing set of factor scores, and both sets of scores would be “correct.” One must ask the question, Of what value is a factor that cannot yield an unambiguous rank-ordering of the individuals in the analysis?  It seems that an indeterminate factor is of dubious scientific value, and researchers should assess the degree of indeterminacy in their common factors.
  2. A highly indeterminate factor yields factor score estimates that may not be highly correlated with the factor itself.  This issue is essentially a question of validity. For example, an unwary researcher may label one of several orthogonal factors as “neuroticism” and fail to realize that the factor score estimates are saturated with unexplained sources of variance. The disparity between the labeled factor and the factor score estimates will also be carried over to subsequent analyses in which the estimates are employed. For example, factor score estimates are often used as variables in ANOVA or regression analyses. The interpretation of the results obtained from these analyses will all be predicated on the erroneous assumption that the factor score estimates are valid representations of the factors they are intended to measure. Jum Nunnally summarized this point as follows:
    1. “If the multiple correlation [the proportion of determinacy in the factor] is less than .70, one is in trouble. In that instance the error variance in estimating the factor would be approximately the same as the valid variance. At a very minimum, one should be quite suspicious of factor estimates obtained with a multiple correlation of less than .50, because in that case less than 25 percent of the variance of factor scores can be predicted from the variables. Then one could not trust the variables as actually representing the factor, and it would be of dubious value to perform further studies supposedly concerning the factor....[and] the factor should be ‘released’ to other scientists only when good estimates of factor scores are possible.” (1978, p. 426).
    Assessing the degree of indeterminacy in a set of factors is hence an extremely important step in the entire research program that incorporates an exploratory, common factor analysis.
  3. Even for a highly determinate factor one can choose a poor method of computing factor score estimates. The extant methods for computing factor score estimates grew out of the indeterminacy debate. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses and none offers a solution to indeterminacy. Some methods may also be severely flawed in the sense that they yield factor score estimates that are very poor representations of the factors. In other words, even though the factor may have a small proportion of indeterminacy, the factor score estimates computed by the researcher may be invalid representations of the factor. As discussed with the second reason above, the consequent lack of validity will carry over into analyses based upon the factor score estimates.  The point is that one needs not only to evaluate indeterminacy, but the statistical properties of the factor score estimates as well.
  4. Principal components and image common factors are determinate in nature. Hence, refined component or image scores will be synonymous with the components or image factors themselves. Coarse component or image scores, however, should be considered as estimates -- imperfect representations of the extracted components or image factors. A researcher may choose a dubious method for computing coarse component or image scores; for instance, by summing items selected on the basis of the rotated structure coefficients rather than the factor score coefficients. In such an instance the estimates will likely stand as poor representations of the latent variates. The properties of coarse component or image scores should therefore be routinely assessed even though the components and image factors are determinate.
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