On the Dimensionality of the Wais Battery for Two Groups of Normal Males

Abstract

Many persons ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18) have applied factor analysis to the Wechsler? and the consensus of most of their results has led to the prevailing psychometric view that this battery measures just three common factors. However, discordant results have recently been reported by Cohen (6, 8), who obtained evidence in support of five common factors for a series of samples spanning a wide range of ages. Earlier, Davis (9 ) reported a factor analytic study of the WB-I together with other test variables, in which he found ten distinct factors each of which was correlated with at least one Wechsler subtest. In evaluating this situation it must be borne in mind that common factor analysis, using communality estimates in the diagonal of an 11 by 11 subtest intercorrelation matrix and assuming the validity of conventional factor analytic reasoning, cannot require more than seven factors under any conditions, and can provide a very good fit to the observed correlations with even fewer factors. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the typical three-factor result may depend more on this limiting feature of the methodology rather than on any reality of the data. Cohen's results provide support for such a hypothesis, even his fivefactor results having been obtained from matrices that could require eight at most. (His WISC matrices were 12 by 12.) Davis' results also support such a hypothesis, but they are not fully convincing, both because other non-Wechsler

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.