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Exercise

Selecting the best model

Now use your knowledge of finding and interpreting absolute and relative model fit statistics to select the best model for your data. When I introduced this dataset I said that the items were theorized to load onto five factors, but you may have noticed that your scree plot indicated six factors. You might be wondering which you should trust. Not to worry - you can use fit statistics to make am empirical decision about how many factors to use.

First, you'll use the bfi_EFA dataset to run EFAs with each of the hypothesized number of factors. Then, you can look at the BIC, which is a relative fit statistic, to compare models. Remember, the lowest BIC is preferred!

Instructions

100 XP
  • Run both EFAs on the bfi_EFA dataset - one with five factors according to the theory, and one with six factors according to the eigenvalues.
  • Take a look at the BIC value for each of the models. The BIC is stored in the BIC list element of the results object.