Mplus Web Paper No. 1 - Using Mplus To Do Exploratory Factor Analysis: An Overview of the State Of The Art. May 2026.

  This web paper is arranged as a slide presentation. Instead of spoken words, however, text is shown below each slide. The web paper can be viewed as a full paper or by section below:

• Section 0 (slides 1-2, pages 1-2):

  Introduction and overview

  
  
• Section 1 (slides 3-5, pages 3-7):

  EFA background

  
  
• Section 2 (slides 6-65, pages 8-67):

  EFA variations

  • Section 2.1 (slides 7-44, pages 9-46):

    Hypothesis about the number of factors

    • Section 2.1.1 (slides 8-17, pages 10-19):

      Three Regular EFA approaches. H&S example

    • Section 2.1.2 (slides 18-20, pages 20-22):

      British Household Panel example Correlated residuals

    • Section 2.1.3 (slides 21-30, pages 23-32):

      Second-order EFA (SEFA) using PSEM with GEOMIN priors

    • Section 2.1.4 (slides 31-44, pages 33-46):

      Bi-factor analysis using ROTATION=BI-GEOMIN and direct effects second-order EFA (DSEFA) using PSEM

  • Section 2.2 (slides 45-54, pages 47-56):

    Hypothesis about the number of factors and key items

    • Section 2.2.1 (slides 46-48, pages 48-50):

      ESEM with Target rotation

    • Section 2.2.2 (slides 49-54, pages 51-56):

      PSEM with ALF priors for cross loadings

  • Section 2.3 (slides 55-58, pages 57-60):

    Comparing EFA methods

  • Section 2.4 (slides 59-65, pages 61-67):

    Special models

  
  
• Section 3 (slides 66-82, pages 68-84):

  EFA in an SEM setting

  • Section 3.1.1 (slides 68-73, pages 70-75):

    ESEM MIMIC

  • Section 3.2 (slides 74-82, pages 76-84):

    EFA/CFA on EFA/CFA

  
  
• Section 4 (slides 83-94, pages 85-96):

  EFA in a multiple-group setting

  • Section 4.1 (slides 86-94, pages 88-96):

    Alignment

  
  
• Section 5 (slides 95-122, pages 97-124):

  EFA in a longitudinal setting

  • Section 5.1 (slides 107-114, pages 109-116):

    EFA longitudinal invariance testing

  • Section 5.2 (slides 115-120, pages 117-122):

    EFA longitudinal alignment

  • Section 5.3 (slides 121-122, pages 123-124):

    EFA growth modeling

• Section 6 (slides 123-124, pages 125-126):

  Further Topics

  
  
• Section 7 (slides 125-135, pages 127-137):

  EFA Theory

  
  
• Section 8 (slides 136-137, pages 138-139):

  References

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