General Structural Equation Modeling and Replication Method for Factor Analysis on a Coping Strategies Questionnaire

• Activity Number: 351
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Mental Health Statistics Section
• Author(s): Chris M. Manuel*+ and Jason Robinson and Paul Cinciripini
• Companies: University of Texas School of Public Health and MD Anderson Cancer Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Keywords: Psychometrics ; Exploratory Factor Analysis ; Behavioral Science ; Latent Variable Modeling ; Smoking Cessation ; Coping

Abstract

A common strategy in smoking cessation therapy is to teach skills for coping with the craving to smoke. Often, it is of interest to determine what kind of coping strategies participants have employed before, during, and after the intervention. A questionnaire, the Coping Behavior Scale, was developed to measure a smoker's self-identified adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. We sought to produce a statistically validated questionnaire by conducting formal psychometric analysis, chiefly factor analysis, on a baseline sample of ordered categorical data, with a size of n=877 patients pooled from three smoking cessation clinical studies.

Model formulation for our data is based on the General Structural Equation Modeling utilized in the MPlus software. Model parameters are estimated using the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) technique. A cross validation technique is employed to ensure the replicability of the factor structure. We compare this cross validation technique to other methods in terms of model fit and model intepretability. Finally, we analyze the predictive ability of the extracted factors using smoking relapse as an outcome.