AVE calculation under CFA

MaBH

Hi everyone!

I am currently using JSAP for one of my research projects, and I am now using the CFA function to validate my measurement models.

I am very grateful that JASP can directly output the AVE value while I have some questions about the calculation procedure

In the following screenshot, the standardized item loadings are 0.849, 0.799, 0.693, 0.809.

As such, the squared loadings should be: 0.721, 0.638, 0.480, 0.654, and the AVE value should be the average of squared loadings, which is 0.623.

However, it does not equal to the output given by JASP (I am using JASP 0.18.3):

I would much appreciate it if anyone could help me with this issue, thanks a lot in advance! :)

Best Regards,

Bohao

EJ

I'll forward this to our experts.

Cheers,

E.J.

Kucharssim

Hi @MaBH,

The AVE is calculated by the package semTools, from its documentation (https://search.r-project.org/CRAN/refmans/semTools/html/AVE.html) we can read that the AVE is calculated as

Now I don't have enough intuition to confirm that that is the same as calculating the average of the squared standardized factor loadings.

From your screenshots, I can't calculate the AVE by hand, as I am missing the covariance matrix of the factors, and the implied covariance of the indicators (alternatively the covariance matrix of the residuals). However, if I try to do the calculations by hand using the formula above in some random datasets, the results match the one of JASP.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Simon

MaBH

Hi Simon,

Thanks a lot for the clarification!

I think the approach I was using is the original formula proposed in Fornell & Larcker (1981) while the semTools package adopts a more generalized formula, which does not impose any assumptions on factor variance.

Thanks a lot for helping me with the concepts, as I have learned something meaningful from this. 😀

Best Regards,

Bohao