Re: Multiple Imputation

Posted by Art Kendall on
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Multiple-Imputation-tp4994372p5723116.html

Dichotomies are perhaps the only instance of all intervals being perfectly interval because there is only 1 interval and it is necessarily equal to itself.

Likert items are usually not severely discrepant from interval level.  What is the response scale on you other interval level items?
If it is an established questionnaire, I would not want to impute values from one construct from another. This is especially so if one is an IV and one is a DV or if they were derived as factors and divergent validity is important.

If it is an established scale, I would only bother with a factor analysis and reliability run to check that I was using the scoring key correctly.

If you use the mean.n function to get the score that should work satisfactorily.

If you are using correlation based analysis the correlation process itself standardizes (Zs) the scores.

For those variables that you are considering scoring by summing, you could check the factor structure to see if it is consistent with what you think should go together by factoring with listwise deletion and with mean substitution to see if there are meaningful differences in the scoring keys you would derive.
If there are not, I would just go ahead with the mean.n function to form the summative score.

I would not worry about CATPCA unless you had some nominal level variables in the mix, and that would be unusual in scale construction.

Keep in mind that the rationale behind using summative scores (sums or means of a set of items) is that each item is an imperfect measure of a construct.  Repeating measurement of the construct with several different items,  yields a summative measure  that is a more credible measurement of the underlying construct.
In factor analytic terms, we are interested in the common variance of the set of items as an operationalization of the underlying construct.

Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants
On 11/16/2013 1:04 PM, therp [via SPSSX Discussion] wrote:
Hello Art, thank you for your answer!

I have missing values on both my IVs and DVs. IVs and DVs were measured in seperate sessions because I'm working on a prediction model.
The response scale of my IV items is a Likert scale -here I'm using an established questionnaire for two constructs. I have 3.3% missing values on the first and 0.4% on the second construct.
Little's test showed that MCAR is present only for one of the constructs and seperate variance t tests could not be computed on the other construct because I only had single missing values on variables in that construct. Not sure what I will do with this result yet... Some missings are due to a software error (first construct) and some are random that I can't explain (second construct).

For the DVs, I constructed behavioral items and the response scale for almost all of the items is picking between a prejudiced or not prejudiced alternative [0;1]. Other DV items have a Likert response scale and some an interval. I understand that I have to z-tranform the variables before building scales, but since z-transformation uses the mean of a variable i don't know if i can do this before imputation.
I have 6.1% missing data total on my DVs and I will drop variables with more than 10% missings.

Yes, for the DVs I know that some of my variables allowed nonresponse too easily (that's the 3 i dropped) and some missings are due to participants abandoning the experiment at the very end, and some due to technical mistakes.

Yes, I considered CATPCA, but since i have a dataset with mixed scales i wasn't sure..but I will look into it again, thank you! On top of that, a CFA might be even more right vor my procedure since I have a theory behind the item structure...either way, if I built scales for my DVs, my missing values would lead to up to 1/3 missing values on my new scales.
Do you think that a better procedure in my case would be running a CFA with the missing values, build scales, and then impute missings on scale level?

Thank you very very much for any further advice!
regards,
therp


Am 16.11.2013 18:06, schrieb Art Kendall [via SPSSX Discussion]:
You say you are building scales.  What is the response scale on the items you are considering?  Usually scales are built of strictly interval level items (e.g., Z's or temperature) or of items that are not severely discrepant from interval level such as extent response scales or Likert response scales.

How extensive is your missing data?  Do you know why data is missing for some items?

Were you thinking of CATPCA rather than FACTOR for EFA?

Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants
On 11/16/2013 10:28 AM, therp [via SPSSX Discussion] wrote:
Hello!
Thank you so much for this interesting discussion. Unforunately as far as I understand the suggestions on using EM for EFA don't solve the problems for categorical variables with missing values, since EM cannot be applied to categorical data in SPSS (and in general??). On top of that, SPSS won't compute Little's MCAR test for categoriacal variables
Does someone have any suggestions for dealing with missing values on categorical variables? My proximal goal is to build scales using EFA and reliability analyses. I know MI is the state of the art, but as it has already been noted, spss doesn't produce pooled results for EFA yet.


I appreciate any help/advice/comment!!!!



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