Ignorance or Negligence: Uncomfortable Truth Regarding Misuse ofConfirmatory Factor Analysis

[摘要] We are uncomfortable. As a scientist and biostatistician, we feelrather uncomfortable whenever people misuse an analytical method byviolating necessary assumptions, which eventually leads to aninappropriate method for the situation. For example, more oіen thannot, we use an ordinary regression model even when clustering issuspected, assuming that the sample is homogeneous. Indeed, in manycases we need to relax the assumptions of a method, because no othermethods exist that are precisely suitable for the dataset. However, whatif there are some methods and we are simply not aware of these bettermethods? What if our ignorance leads us to misuse a method? Amongsuch disasters of the misuse of methodology, conٽrmDtory factoranalysis (CFA) would be one of the representative examples.