I'm writing a CFA paper, and I have run into some trouble interpreting the AIC and BIC. This is my first paper using continuous variables, thus the first time I will be reporting these fit statistics and I'm still learning the SEM method overall so bear with me, please.
The paper in question looks at an existing psychometric, but I am scoring it in a slightly different way than was intended. The measure has a frequency of experience and a distress element in it, and usually the frequency of experience is analysed for best fitting model with the distress element later correlated with the model. I have summed both of these elements (frequency scores + distress scores) to produce a new single set of scores which I have then run within a CFA framework (5 factor model using MLR).
The other fit indices look great, however, the AIC and BIC look like this:
CFA on the different elements of the measure:
Frequency : AIC= 12313.226 BiC: 12602.260
Distress : AIC= 10318.698 BIC: 10607.731
Summed : AIC= 22039.130 BIC: 22328.163
How would I go about interpreting these values?
Best Answer
You can check out this book: "Model Selection and Multimodel Inference A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach", Burnham & Anderson 2nd. Ed.