ABSTRACT
We provide reporting guidelines for multilevel factor analysis (MFA) and use these guidelines to systematically review 72 MFA applications in journals across a range of disciplines (e.g., education, health/nursing, management, and psychology) published between 1994 and 2014. Results are organized in terms of the (a) characteristics of the MFA application (e.g., construct measured), (b) purpose (e.g., measurement validation), (c) data source (e.g., number of cases at Level 1 and Level 2), (d) statistical approach (e.g., maximum likelihood), and (e) results reported (e.g., intraclass correlations for indicators and latent variables, standardized factor loadings, fit indices). Results from this review have implications for applied researchers interested in expanding their approaches to psychometric analyses and construct validation within a multilevel framework and for methodologists using Monte Carlo methods to explore technical and methodological issues grounded in realistic research design conditions.
Article information
Conflict of interest disclosures: Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.
Ethical Principles: The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.
Funding: This work was not supported by a grant from any funding agency.
Role of the Funders/Sponsors: None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
Acknowledgments: The authors thank anonymous reviewers for their comments on prior versions of this manuscript. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institution is not intended and should not be inferred.
Notes
1 The current version of Mplus (7.4) has the THREELEVEL option and supports the raw data entry for data analysis as well as a covariance or correlation matrix.