SPSS Amos – How to Create Item Parcels in SPSS Amos

amosconfirmatory-factorstructural-equation-modeling

I am trying to run a SEM to see the causal relationship among latent variables. I ran the CFA and SEM using Amos, but I realized that the model is very complicated since one factor, which I originally thought to be unidimensional, is two-dimensional, and that makes the model look very messy. Since that factor is not derived from a theoretical background, it seems hard to force to use it as unidimensional. Also, a construct validity test also indicated that the factor is two-dimensional.

I know that creating parcels and running the path model has lots of limitations, such as not including error, and it is not necessarily used to create a parsimonious model, but I want to compare whether there are any big differences between CFA and a model with item parceling.

I saw lots of articles that have debated item parceling, but couldn't find how to conduct item parceling in Amos. How can I conduct item parceling in Amos?
Thanks!

Best Answer

I've got a few notes here on the topic of item parcelling.

But Jeremy Miles makes the main point. You don't parcel in Amos. You use other software (for Amos users, this is typically SPSS) to combine items into parcels. There are a variety of ways of making parcels, but common approaches simply involve dividing the items in a set into parcels and taking the sum of mean of items within parcels to form the parcels.

In SPSS, you can often do this efficiently by using syntax. E.g., Something like this:

compute parcel1 = mean(i1, i2, i3).
compute parcel2 = mean(i4, i5, i6).
execute.
Related Question