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 Jonathan Gellar posted on Tuesday, February 07, 2017 - 2:40 pm
Hi there,

I have a survey that has questions grouped within domains. We would like to generate a composite score for each domain. Up to now, we have done a simple average of the question responses within each domain. We would like to change this to a weighted average, where the weights are estimated from a CFA model, and sum to 1 within each domain. We have a focus on simplicity here: we want to make sure that the domain scores can be calculated “by hand”, as the sum of weights x item responses.

Am I correct that question can be answered using CFA? Are there constraints that I need to place on the model in order to fit the above criteria that allow the domain scores to be calculated “by hand”?

Note: the survey questions are all categorical or binary. However, since we are taking a weighted average of the responses (which is a linear combination), it seems necessary to treat them as continuous in order to estimate the weights properly. Do you agree, and does this cause any sort of problem?

Thanks,
Jonathan
 Linda K. Muthen posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2017 - 6:35 am
You should ask this general questions on a general discussion forum like SEMNET.
 Jonathan Gellar posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2017 - 6:48 am
I apologize, I thought that since it was a question about a CFA, that this would be the appropriate forum. I will re-post over there.
 Linda K. Muthen posted on Wednesday, February 08, 2017 - 9:30 pm
This is a discussion forum related to Mplus not general statistical questions. CFA is not specific to Mplus.
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