I am working on an exploratory factor analysis of dichotomous items. I've found this post extremely helpful. However, Mplus seems to be a standard that journals in my field are expecting, and I would love to replicate Mplus results in R.
I've gotten my results to come very close to Mplus, using the fa function on a polychoric correlation matrix (created with the hetcor function) and the geominQ rotation. It seems that the major difference between the fa function and Mplus is that the latter uses a robust weighted least squares factoring method (WLSMV – a diagonal weight matrix), whereas the former uses a regular weighted least squares (WLS) factoring method.
Has anyone managed to use R to replicate Mplus factor analysis for binary items? Has anyone figured out how to implement WLSMV in R?
Thanks!
Best Answer
What you want is in the
lavaan
package, the function is namedsem
. Try writing an argumentestimator = "WLSMV"
. For more information read this.