psych (version 1.0-42)

make.hierarchical: Create a population or sample correlation matrix with hierachical structure.

Description

Create a population hierarchical correlation matrix from a set of factor loadings and factor intercorrelations. Samples of size n may be then be drawn from this population. Return either the sample data, sample correlations, or population correlations. This is used to create sample data sets for instruction and demonstration.

Usage

make.hierarchical(gload=NULL, fload=NULL, n = 0, raw = FALSE)

Arguments

gload
Loadings of group factors on a general factor
fload
Loadings of items on the group factor
n
Number of subjects to generate: N=0 => population values
raw
raw=TRUE, report the raw data, raw=FALSE, report the sample correlation matrix.

Value

  • a matrix of correlations or a data matrix

Details

Many personality and cognitive tests have a hierarchical factor structure. For demonstration purposes, it is useful to be able to create such matrices, either with population values, or sample values.

Given a matrix of item factor loadings (fload) and of loadings of these factors on a general factor (gload), we create a population correlation matrix by using the general factor law (R = F' theta F where theta = g'g).

To create sample values, we use the mvrnorm function from MASS.

The default is to return population correlation matrices. Sample correlation matrices are generated if n >0. Raw data are returned if raw = TRUE.

The default values for gload and fload create a data matrix discussed by Jensen and Weng, 1994.

References

http://personality-project.org/r/r.omega.html Jensen, A.R., Weng, L.J. (1994) What is a Good g? Intelligence, 18, 231-258.

See Also

omega, schmid, ICLUST, VSS, mvrnorm

Examples

Run this code
gload <-  gload<-matrix(c(.9,.8,.7),nrow=3)    # a higher order factor matrix
fload <-matrix(c(                    #a lower order (oblique) factor matrix
           .8,0,0,
           .7,0,.0,
           .6,0,.0,
            0,.7,.0,
            0,.6,.0,
            0,.5,0,
            0,0,.6,
            0,0,.5,
            0,0,.4),   ncol=3,byrow=TRUE)
            
jensen <- make.hierarchical(gload,fload)    #the test set used by omega
round(jensen,2)

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