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 EFried posted on Thursday, January 31, 2013 - 6:53 am
We have 9 variables and want to perform EFA/CFA/ESEM with MPLUS. Variables are between 0.00 and 1.00 with an excess of zeroes, we're currently multiplying them with 100 and use COUNT since they are poisson distributed.

Unfortunately, all 9 variables always sum to exactly 1 for each person, leading to non-convergence.

Have you dealt with this issue before and would have recommendations as to how to solve this?

Thank you
 Linda K. Muthen posted on Thursday, January 31, 2013 - 9:44 am
Are the measures ipsative?
 EFried posted on Monday, February 04, 2013 - 4:53 am
Not really. We measured distances of people to each other in a social network on a Likert scale (1-5).

The 9 variables are the percentage of types of relations in a social network. These sum to 100%.

E.g., if a person has lots of "close social relations", the person has less relations that are not close.

I found very little literature on that. The data are fine, but R, MPLUS, and SPSS all run into convergence issues for PCA and EFA/CFA/ESEM, so I assume the problem is that the variables add to 100%.

Thank you Linda!
 Bengt O. Muthen posted on Monday, February 04, 2013 - 6:25 pm
Without understanding the motivation for factor analysis in this situation, one simple approach is to delete 1 of the 9 variables so they don't sum to 1; it sounds like the 9th variable doesn't carry any extra information.

I don't know how relevant this is but, sociometric analysis using cross-classified models is described by Hox in his multilevel book, section 9.2.
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