Application of confirmatory factor analysis in studying the achievements of index system in clinical sciences and technologies / 中华流行病学杂志

ABSTRACT

To explore the role of confirmatory factor analysis in checking the construct validity of index system in clinical sciences and technologies and to determine the weighting of each index.Data were collected based on the achievements regarding the index system of sciences,technologies and analyzed by softwares SPSS and AMOS.Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to assess the construct validity and to identify the weighting.The P values for testing the two-order confirmatory factor models were bigger than 0.05,indicating that the actual data were in agreement with theory in designing the index system.Statistics on the goodness fit index(GFI)such as GFI were bigger than 0.90,indicating that they were satisfactory.Weightings for each index were identified based on factor loading of confirmatory factor analysis,showing that they were highly correlated with that from the Delphi method.Confirmatory factor analysis appeared to be an appropriate method in analyzing the associations among the index variables,and could be widely used to assess the construct validity of index system and identifing the weightings.