A Comparison of Method Effects in Two Confirmatory Factor Models for Structurally Different Methods

Multimethod data analysis is a complex procedure that is often used to examine the degree to which different measures of the same construct converge in the assessment of this construct. Several authors have called for a greater understanding of the definition and meaning of method effects in different models for multimethod data. In this article, we compare 2 recently proposed approaches for modeling data with structurally different methods with regard to the definition and meaning of method effects, the restricted CT-C(M – 1) model and the latent difference model. We also introduce the concepts of individual, conditional, and general method bias and show how these types of biases are represented in the models. An application to a multirater data set (N = 199) as well as recommendations for the application and interpretation of each model are provided.

Keywords: confirmatory factor analysis, CT-C(M – 1), latent difference, method effects, multitrait–multimethod analysis
Resource: DOI