Dear all,

We're trying to run a confirmatory factor analysis on a motivational measure of a total 44 items, that we expect can be reduced to 10 factors. We have 311 observations in the data set.

I run the code below, but the model does not achieve convergence. I tried to let the model iterate to more than 600 iterations, and convergence was still not achieved.

I looked at the assumption of multivariate normal distribution, which is not met, but as far as I understand, the Satorra Bentler estimator should be robust to this violation.


Does anyone have any ideas how to make the model achieve convergence?


I have tried stopping the iteration process at 50 iterations, when the log pseudolikelihood doesn't change anymore and run the stats on this model. Can these stats be interpreted, or are they not valid, when the model is not converging?


All help is appreciated!

Best,
Astrid

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CODE:

sem (ONE -> item1 item11 item20 item29 item38) ///
(TWO -> item2 item12r item21r item30 item39) ///
(THREE -> item3 item13 item22 item31) ///
(FOUR -> item4 item40) ///
(FIVE -> item5 item14 item23 item32) ///
(SIX -> item6 item15 item24 item33 item41) ///
(SEVEN -> item7 item16 item25 item34 item42) ///
(EIGHT -> item8 item17r item26 item35) ///
(NINE -> item9 item18 item27 item36 item43) ///
(TEN -> item10 item19 item28 item37 item44), standardize latent(ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN) vce(sbentler)

estat gof, stats(all)