Thank you Prof. Please my little quesrion is, would I be right to say that this approach suits a structural model as you have here and not CFA measurement model? (Just for clarity for those like me who have struggled through several vdeos to understand the difderences in approaches). Thank you 🙏🏽
Yes, you need to assess model fit before you even start addressing the two group analysis. You will have a model fit statistic for each group that needs to be presented
Is this similar to multilevel SEM? Would you be able to use a similar method to adjust for clustering, ie. divide the data by country and compare the model between countries? If not, do you have a video on this?
So the downside of AMOS is multi-level modeling is not part of the package. The best software to use for that is MPLUS. AMOS just can not do multi-level analysis. Saying that, you could do a two group analysis across countries. That is not really "multi-level". Those are different entities. Multi-level would be like measuring managers and employees from a single organization. Hope that helps.
If it is not separate groups, then you will need to dummy code the data into groups (1,0). You will then run the analysis with the dummy coded variable as the two groups. Hope this helps.
It gets way more complicated with three groups because you can not analyze them all at once because AMOS will just denote if differences exist within all three groups at the same time....that does not really tell you much. If you have 3 groups (A, B, C), you will need to run a two group between A and B, then B and C, and finally A and C. That is not ideal but it is what is required to find the specific differences across the groups.
My structural model fits (with all the data). However, when I run a group analysis the Amos output message is "iterations limit reached, the results that follow therefore are incorrect". is there anyway I can fix this? . Please a second question, what happens when one of my constrains ends up in a model that does not fit , Amos wont stimate the chi-square results, how can I assess if the difference is significant or not for those cases?
There are a lot of reason for an iteration limit....if I am taking my best guess, you have multicollinearity in your model. Look for the two unobserved variables that are highly correlated with one another. You may have so much overlap that AMOS can not get a unique solution