Hello Everyone in Stataland!

I am struggling to conduct a higher-order confirmatory factor analysis with ordinal categorical and binary variables (i.e. observed items).

My model is composed of four latent domains (first order) and one overarching latent domain (second order). Two of the domains comprise categorical ordinal items (e.g. "agree," "neutral," "disagree" etc.), while two comprise items with binary responses (e.g. "yes/no"). I have tried running the model, specifying the appropriate link/family option for each observed item (i.e. binary vs. categorical). None of the models have converged. When I remove entire domains from the model, I have the same issue. I am working with a data set of 986. All 986 respondents responded to all items.

I have scoured the online forums and tried to adapt code that I have found for conducting exploratory factor analysis and principal components analysis with binary and categorical data in STATA (e.g. using polychoric correlations), but to no avail. A lot of people I have talk to at my university have recommended I conduct this type of analysis in MPlus, but I can't imagine that STATA is not capable of a higher-order CFA with binary and categorical data.


Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Pauley